RSI 14 Under 35 + SMA 200 Filter, Low ADX Regime Pass

We tested a mean-reversion strategy that buys when RSI 14 drops below 35, price remains above the 200-period moving average, and ADX sits below 35 to avoid strong trends. It passed all six of our gates with 0.846% average profit per trade and an 87.5% win rate in both training and validation. The deflated Sharpe ratio came in at 4.41.

The strategy exits on a net profit target of 1.25% (no explicit stop loss in the gene config). It ran on BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP at 15-minute bars. Both walk-forward training and validation produced identical performance metrics, which is encouraging for consistency but also suggests the validation window may have shared regime characteristics with training.

Here is where you should stay skeptical. The probability of this being a fluke after multi-test correction is 92.6%, which is alarmingly high. That figure accounts for the fact that we test thousands of gene variants, and even random noise can pass gates if you run enough experiments. The strategy has also logged zero trades in forward paper testing so far, so we have no live regime confirmation yet. The ADX regime filter (rejecting strong trends) means this only fires in choppy, rangebound conditions. If markets have been trending since graduation, the strategy simply waits.

The four-coin coverage is narrow. We do not yet know how this performs across mid-cap altcoins or in prolonged trending regimes. The 87.5% win rate is based on backtest walk-forward windows, and real slippage or exchange downtime could erode that edge. The 15-minute timeframe also means higher trade frequency and more sensitivity to execution costs, though our backtests bake in 0.15% fees per trade.

We graduated this because it met our mechanical thresholds, but the high fluke probability and zero forward trades make this a wait-and-see case. If you want to see how we calculate deflated Sharpe ratios (a metric that penalizes overfitting), visit our learn section. To track whether forward trades start appearing, check the full survivor registry at stratproof.com/survivors. If you have your own RSI or regime-filter idea, test it at stratproof.com/prove.