Basics.

How to read a study

Every study card has four headline stats. Here’s what they mean in plain language:

Win rate — What percentage of trades ended in profit. A 60% win rate means 6 out of 10 trades made money.

Profit factor (PF) — How many dollars you won for every $1 lost. A PF above 1.0 means the setup is profitable overall. A PF of 2.0 means it won twice what it lost. Below 1.0 means it loses money. Higher is better, but always check the trade count too.

Trades — How many times the setup actually triggered over the test window. This is your sample size: more trades = more reliable. A setup with 20 trades and a PF of 3.0 is far less trustworthy than one with 200 trades and a PF of 1.6.

Net result — Total points gained or lost over the whole test window. This tells you the raw “did it make money” answer, before any compounding or position sizing.

We only keep setups that still work in the recent regime (2024+). A setup that worked years ago but is dead now gets removed — you won’t see it here.

Variants

A study tests a few parameter variants — different take-profit rules, different break-even rules, or slight entry-timing tweaks. We surface the best variant by profit factor. The idea is simple: the setup definition matters less than finding the parameter combination that actually held up.

The setups in plain English

Trading jargon is a wall. Here’s what each concept actually means:

• IFVG (Inverse Fair Value Gap) — A price gap that got filled and then flipped into support or resistance. The market ran through an old gap and is now treating it as the opposite level.
• SMT Divergence — Two related markets (like NQ and ES) disagree on direction. One makes a higher high while the other doesn’t. ICT traders treat that disagreement as a reversal signal.
• Straddle — Bracketing both sides of a news release. You enter in whichever direction fires after the number drops. If it rips up, you’re long. If it dumps, you’re short.
• Killzone — A high-activity trading window during the session, like the London or New York open. ICT traders treat these as the most liquid and predictable hours to trade.
• IB50 (Initial Balance 50%) — An entry at the 50% retracement of the session’s first range. The idea is price will revisit the midpoint of its opening swing before continuing.
• FVG (Fair Value Gap) — A price imbalance left by a fast move: three candles where the wicks don’t overlap. Markets often revisit these gaps to “fill” them.
• NWOG (New Week Opening Gap) — The gap between Friday’s close and Sunday’s open. Some setups use this as a magnet level for the early-week price action.
• BE / SL / TP — Break Even (moving your stop to entry price so you can’t lose), Stop Loss (the level that closes a losing trade), Take Profit (the target where you close a winning trade). These are the three exit points every trade has.

What this is / isn’t

This is a collection of educational backtests on 1-minute futures data. It is not trading signals, not financial advice, and not a roadmap for what to do at the next 8:30 AM data release (when most US economic numbers drop). Every figure here is a rear-view mirror — past performance does not guarantee future results. Always re-verify before risking money.

Methodology →