The thesis
RSI Snap-Back is a mean-reversion play on the Magnificent Seven — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, META, and TSLA. The premise is simple and well-worn: large-cap tech tends to overshoot on short-term momentum, then snap back. The strategy buys the most oversold names (RSI below 35), exits into strength (RSI above 70), and enforces discipline with a hard four-slot book. That cap is the interesting design choice — it limits how many concurrent reversion bets can be open at once, which should keep correlated drawdowns from compounding when the whole complex sells off together.
Backtest performance
Over 451 days, the strategy returned 20.95% (final equity $12,095 on a $10,000 base), an 11.21% CAGR. The win rate is a healthy 66.67% across 37 trades, and fees were negligible at $37 with no FX cost. That's a respectable hit rate for a systematic rules engine.
The Sharpe of 0.61 is where enthusiasm should cool. It signals that returns, while positive, came with meaningful volatility relative to the reward. The 23.73% max drawdown confirms it: an investor would have had to stomach nearly a quarter of their capital evaporating at the worst point. For a strategy whose selling point is disciplined risk control, that drawdown is a reminder that concentrating in seven highly correlated mega-caps offers little diversification when tech rolls over in unison.
Turnover is also eye-catching at 773% — the book churns roughly eight times over the test window. Rotation is core to the design, but heavy turnover raises the strategy's sensitivity to slippage and execution costs that a clean backtest can understate.
Validation gap
The most important caveat: the validation field is null. There is no walk-forward or out-of-sample record attached here. A 66% win rate on a single backtest is encouraging but not proof — mean-reversion thresholds like RSI 35/70 are exactly the kind of parameters that can be quietly overfit. Until there's a holdout or walk-forward result, treat the headline numbers as in-sample and provisional.
Live activity: quiet
Live, the strategy has done nothing recently. The last six scheduled runs — August 4 through 11 — each report 0 executed, 0 rejected, with the book flat at $10,000 cash. No trades have printed. That's not necessarily a fault: if no name has crossed RSI 35, the rules correctly keep the strategy in cash rather than forcing a trade. Discipline includes patience. But it does mean the live track record is currently empty, and we can't yet confirm the backtested edge survives contact with real quotes and fills.
Verdict
RSI Snap-Back is a coherent, well-disciplined idea with an attractive win rate and a sensible position cap. The risks are equally clear: a soft Sharpe, a deep drawdown, high turnover, a concentrated correlated universe, and — most of all — no validation and no live trades yet. Promising on paper, unproven in practice. Worth watching for its first live entry signal before drawing conclusions.