Strategies without the sales pitch

Strategy content is where most forex sites make their money, and it is usually the least useful thing they publish. The pattern is familiar: a named setup, a chart with an arrow on it, a win rate, and no mention of how many variations were tried before that one photographed well.

This section is deliberately narrower. It covers method — how to state a strategy precisely enough to test, and how to test it so the answer is worth acting on. Those two skills apply to any setup you eventually trade, including ones nobody has written about yet.

Why method comes before setups

Two traders can run the same setup and get opposite outcomes, because a setup is only one of five decisions. The other four — exit, stop, size, and when to sit out — decide the result far more than the entry does, and they are the ones that never appear in the screenshot.

There is also a mathematical problem with the way setups get discovered. Bailey, Borwein, López de Prado and Zhu showed in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society that a small number of strategy variations tested against one history is enough to produce an impressive backtest by chance alone, and that the probability the best one is overfit rises with every variant tried. Since almost nobody publishes how many they tried, a strategy presented with a compelling backtest and no attempt count is not evidence of anything.

That is not a reason to give up on strategy. It is a reason to hold your own results to a standard that survives it.

What is here

Building a system you can actually test — the five rules that turn an intuition into something checkable: entry, exit, stop, size, and the conditions where the system does not apply. That last one is the rule almost nobody writes and the one that prevents the most damage.

Backtesting honestly — how to run a test whose result means something: fix the rules before you look, hold data back and use it once, count every variant you try, and model the spread and swap costs that will actually apply. Also what to read on an equity curve, which is never the total return.

Before you spend time here

If you have not done the risk work, do it first. Position sizing and drawdown arithmetic decide whether any strategy has time to work, and no edge survives being traded at the wrong size. The Learn Forex path covers both, and they take an hour.

A strategy is a way of deciding which trades to take. Risk management is what lets you still be there when the good ones arrive. Sites that reverse that order are selling something.

What you will not find

No signals, no setups presented as reliable, and no win rates quoted without the sample size and the cost assumptions behind them. Past performance does not indicate future results — the FCA requires firms to say so prominently whenever they show it, and the reasoning does not stop applying because the person showing you the chart is not a firm.