These trading signals for FB were selected from 1,210,488 backtest results for their reward/risk and parameter sensitivity characteristics. While backtests don't typically provide reliable signals which can be counted on moving forward, many swing traders are curious as to what buy and sell signals would have worked up until now.
For the 327 week (6.2 year) period from May 14 2012 to Aug 17 2018, these signals for Facebook, Inc. (FB) traded as directed would have yielded $494,263 in profits from a $10,000 initial investment, an annualized return of 87.3%. The long-side profit (buy/sell only, no shorts) for the signals was $170,258, an annualized return of 58.9%. If you had bought and held the stock for the same period the profit would have been $31,389 (an annualized return of 25.5%). The trading style was Long & Short, meaning that you would be long or short the security at all times.
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 FB strategy there were 320 buy signals and 31 sell signals.These led to 24 long trades of which 18 were profitable, and 24 short trades of which 19 were profitable.
This is a weekly strategy; weekly OHLC data is used to derive all signals and there is at most one buy and sell signal and one trade per week. Drawdown (the worst case loss for an single entry and exit into the strategy) was 22% vs. 57% for buy-hold. Using drawdown plus 5% as our risk metric, and annualized return as the reward metric, the reward/risk for the strategy was 3.20 vs. 0.41 for buy-hold, an improvement factor of around 7.8 .