From 09-Aug-16 to 12-Sep-18, these trading signals for Facebook (FB) used as directed would have performed around 10.6 times better than buy-hold.
These trading signals for FB 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 9 2016 to Sep 12 2018, these signals for Facebook, Inc. (FB) traded both long and short would have yielded $30,973 in profits from a $10,000 initial investment, an annualized return of 96.3%. Traded long only (no short selling) the signals would have returned $13,330, an annualized return of 49.9%. 83.5% of time was spent holding stock long. If you had bought and held the stock for the same period the profit would have been $2,925 (an annualized return of 13.1%).
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 79 buy signals and 16 sell signals.These led to 16 round trip long trades of which 13 were profitable, and 15 short trades of which 14 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 14% for long-short and 14% for long only, compared to 26% 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 5.00 vs. 0.43 for buy-hold, an improvement factor of around 11.8. If traded long only, the reward/risk was 2.59.
The backtests assume a commission per trade of $7.