These trading signals for BABA were selected from over a million backtest results for their reward/risk and parameter sensitivity characteristics.While backtests don't always provide reliable signals which can be counted on moving forward, many traders find value in knowing what buy and sell signals would have worked well in the past.

For the 528 day (2.1 year) period from Aug 11 2016 to Sep 14 2018, these signals for Alibaba (BABA) traded both long and short would have yielded $41,203 in profits from a $10,000 initial investment, an annualized return of 118.3%. Traded long only (no short selling) the signals would have returned $19,507, an annualized return of 67.8%. 78.0% of time was spent holding stock long. If you had bought and held the stock for the same period the profit would have been $7,879 (an annualized return of 32.0%).

For this type of strategy, not every signal is acted upon and signals are often reinforced. If you are long in the security, buy signals can be ignored, for example. Similarly if you are short you can ignore sell signals. For this particular BABA strategy there were 519 buy buy signals and 214 sell sell signals.These led to 114 round trip long trades of which 69 were profitable, and 113 short trades of which 66 were profitable. This is a daily strategy; daily OHLC data is used to derive all signals and there is at most one buy and sell signal and one trade per day.

Drawdown (the worst case loss for an single entry and exit into the strategy) was 12% for long-short and 13% for long only, compared to 27% for buy-hold. Using drawdown plus 5% as our risk metric, and annualized return as the reward metric, the reward/risk for the trading long and short was 6.93 vs. 1.00 for buy-hold, an improvement factor of around 6.9 If traded long only, the reward/risk was 3.71

The backtests assume a commission per trade of $7.