The thesis
RSI Snap-Back is a mean-reversion play on the seven largest US tech names — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, META, and TSLA. The premise is straightforward: large-cap tech tends to overshoot on short-term momentum extremes and then revert. The strategy buys the most oversold names when RSI drops below 35 and exits when RSI pushes above 70, rotating to keep a hard four-slot book. That four-name cap is the discipline mechanism — it forces selectivity and bounds how much concurrent drawdown the book can carry at once.
It's a clean, legible idea. Mean reversion on liquid mega-caps is well-trodden ground, and the RSI thresholds are conventional rather than curve-fit exotica.
What the numbers say
Over a 451-day backtest, the strategy returned 20.95% (final equity $12,095 on a $10k base), for a CAGR of 11.21%. The win rate is a healthy 66.67% across 37 trades, and costs are negligible — $37 in fees, zero FX drag.
The strengths are real: two-thirds of trades landed, the fee load is trivial, and the book stayed tight. But the risk profile deserves a hard look. The maximum drawdown of 23.73% is larger than the total return — a Calmar ratio below 0.5, meaning you endured a bigger peak-to-trough loss than the profit you ultimately kept. The Sharpe of 0.61 is modest; this is a strategy whose returns came with meaningful volatility, not a smooth ride. Turnover of 773% is also high, implying the book churns roughly eight times over — sustainable here only because simulated costs were so low. In a higher-friction environment, that turnover would bite.
The validation gap
Crucially, there is no out-of-sample validation attached to this strategy. The 20.95% figure is an in-sample backtest result. Without a holdout or walk-forward test, we can't distinguish genuine edge from a favorable fit to one 451-day window — and mean-reversion parameters are exactly the kind of knobs that flatter a single sample. This is the single biggest caveat on the record.
Live activity: currently dormant
The live book tells its own story. The last six scheduled runs — from September 21 through 28 — each executed zero trades and rejected zero, with cash sitting flat at $10,000 and no open positions. In other words, no name in the universe has hit the RSI < 35 entry trigger for over a week. That's not a malfunction; it's the strategy behaving as designed in a market without oversold Mag-7 extremes. But it does mean the live track record is, so far, empty of realized outcomes.
Verdict
RSI Snap-Back is a well-specified, low-cost strategy with a plausible thesis and a solid backtested win rate. The concerns are equally clear: a drawdown that exceeds its return, an unremarkable Sharpe, and — most importantly — no validation to confirm the edge holds out of sample. Until the live book actually fires and an out-of-sample test is run, this remains a promising idea awaiting proof rather than a demonstrated performer.