Which trading strategy to start from

By TraderWe· Published Jun 30, 2026· Updated Aug 17, 2026· 💬 8

Everything in this strategy library, arranged by the problem you actually have. New members keep asking where to begin, and the honest answer depends on which part is not working yet.

1. Start from the problem, not the strategy

Where you are	Start here
Never written a trading strategy	the simplest complete one — structure first, cleverness later
Wondering whether your entry is any good	the baseline your strategy has to beat — run it before anything else
Entry works, results are inconsistent	exit rules, four variants compared — most edges live there
Strategy behaves differently per symbol	volatility-based stop loss
Fills feel worse than the backtest	the liquidity filter
Works some weeks and not others	market regime filter — a condition that says do nothing
Running unattended or overnight	three ways out while you sleep or a hard cap on hold time
Not sure whether you are overfitting	the same entry at three sensitivities, then eleven conditions, four trades a month as a cautionary tale
Want to see someone else's mistakes	a beginner strategy, annotated

2. What these are and are not

Every one of these is a shape to adapt, not a strategy to run. The numbers in all of them are placeholders — chosen to be readable rather than to be optimal, and left visible so you can change them. That is deliberate. A strategy with hidden parameters is a strategy you cannot reason about, and a strategy you cannot reason about is one you will abandon the first week it loses.

3. The order most people should actually go in

Read the simplest complete one first, even if you have written strategies before. It takes four minutes and it establishes what "complete" means — an entry, a target, a stop and a time exit. Most broken strategies are missing one of those four. Then run the baseline on your own data before you write anything of your own. Knowing what a deliberately dumb rule earns on your recordings is the only way to tell later whether your clever rule is actually clever. After that, work on exits rather than entries. Everyone tunes entries; the difference between two exits on the same entry is usually larger than the difference between two entries.

4. What none of them can do for you

None of them price your fills. Every strategy here shows a target and a stop, and every one of them is quietly assuming you can transact at the price you see — which is not true, and the size of the gap decides whether any of this works. We measured it: a $5,000 market order in a $5–20 stock pays about 38 basis points one way, roughly 0.75% round trip (what day trading a US stock really costs). One tick of slippage removed 44% of the edge on a real model (one tick of slippage erased 44% of the backtest edge). Read those two before you trust any backtest, including ours.

5. Then test on your own recordings

Not on ours, and not on resampled bars. The whole point of recording your own market is that the backtest fills are the fills you would have had — how to backtest a day trading strategy on US stocks walks through it, and the day trading indicators and factors reference defines every factor these strategies use.

Educational template for research and backtesting. Not investment advice and not a signal service.

8 replies

LurkerLee· Jun 2026 ago

This is the post I needed three months ago.

RiskFirstRita· Jul 2026 ago

And note that the index sends you to a baseline and a risk gate before it sends you to an entry. Correct priorities.

TraderWeTraderWe Team· Jul 2026 ago

Pinning this.

DataDrivenDee· Jul 2026 ago

One thing I'd add for anyone using this as a map: the order matters more than the list does. If you jump straight to the exit variants without running the baseline first you have nothing to compare against, and then how would you even tell whether the exit helped? Ask me how I know.

FiveMinFiona· Jul 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago

Nice to have it all in one place. For newer folks. The do-nothing filter is the one I'd hold off on longest. Get the entry and exit stable first, otherwise you're gating something you don't understand yet and you can't tell which part changed the results.

PremarketPete· Jul 2026 ago

Bookmarked. Missing maybe: something on session/time-of-day rules, unless that's baked into the overnight one.

ZenTrader_Ana· Jul 2026 ago

What I like about the framing is "a shape to adapt". A lot of the frustration I see comes from people running someone else's numbers and then feeling personally bad when it doesn't work, as if they failed. Easier to sit with a drawdown when the rules are yours.

HalfKelly· Jul 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago

Good index. The one gap I'd flag is sizing, there's no template here for how much to put on, and that decision moves your equity curve more than most entry tweaks do. Even a plain "fixed fraction of account per trade, same for every symbol" is worth writing down explicitly rather than deciding in the moment. The volatility-scaled exit gets you partway there since it makes risk per trade more comparable across symbols, but it's not the same thing as choosing the fraction.