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 idea is simple and defensible: large-caps that get hammered on short-term momentum tend to bounce. The strategy buys the most oversold names (RSI below 35), exits into strength (RSI above 70), and rotates to keep a tight four-name book. That hard slot cap is the interesting design choice — it caps concurrent exposure and forces the strategy to hold its best signals rather than sprawl across the whole universe.
Recent activity
Since the Season 2 reset on 29 October, the book has been quiet. Of five scheduled runs through 4 November, only two placed trades: a 7-share GOOGL buy at $280.28 on 30 October, and a 10-share NVDA buy at $204.04 on 2 November. The other three runs executed nothing and rejected nothing — the universe simply wasn't throwing oversold signals. That restraint is a feature, not a bug: a reversion strategy with no edge on a given day should sit on its hands.
Equity has drifted in a narrow band, from $10,000 at reset to $10,022.55 on 4 November, with roughly $5,957 held in cash. In other words, the live account is barely off the starting line — too early to read anything into it beyond "the plumbing works."
Backtest and validation
The backtest is where the case is actually made, and it's a mixed picture. Over 451 days the strategy returned 20.95% (final equity $12,095), an 11.21% CAGR, on 37 trades with a 66.67% win rate and negligible costs ($37 in fees, no FX). Those are respectable hit-rate and cost numbers.
The risk side is less flattering. A Sharpe of 0.61 is modest, and the 23.73% max drawdown is larger than the entire total return — you'd have needed to stomach a loss bigger than the eventual gain to collect it. Turnover of 773% also tells us the four-slot book rotates aggressively; that's survivable here only because fees are tiny in this sandbox.
The most important caveat: the validation field is null. There is no reported out-of-sample or walk-forward result, so every performance figure above comes from the same fitted window. Given how sensitive RSI thresholds (35/70) are to tuning, that's exactly the gap robust-validation discipline exists to close.
The verdict
The reviewer approved the strategy at risk 0.35 — sound logic, correct position-sizing and cash tracking, no look-ahead, with three minor defensive-coding gaps judged non-exploitable. That's a clean bill of code health, not a verdict on edge.
Strengths: a coherent, well-worn thesis; a win rate and cost profile that hold up; genuine discipline in sitting out signal-less days. Risks: a drawdown that dwarfs the return, a middling Sharpe, high turnover, and — most of all — no independent validation to show the edge survives outside its backtest window. Promising on paper; the next few weeks of live trades are what matter.