These trading signals for MSFT were selected from 1,220,000 backtest results for their reward/risk and parameter sensitivity characteristics. While backtests don't typically provide reliable signals which can always be counted on moving forward, many swing traders find value in knowing what buy and sell signals would have worked over time.
For the 528 week (10.1 year) period from Jul 7 2008 to Aug 17 2018, these signals for Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) traded as directed would have yielded $396,274 in profits from a $10,000 initial investment, an annualized return of 44.3%. The long-side profit (buy/sell only, no shorts) for the signals was $141,145, an annualized return of 30.8%. If you had bought and held the stock for the same period the profit would have been $43,187 (an annualized return of 18.0%). 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 MSFT strategy there were 364 buy signals and 273 sell signals.These led to 148 long trades of which 107 were profitable, and 147 short trades of which 104 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 27% vs. 44% 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 1.40 vs. 0.36 for buy-hold, an improvement factor of around 3.8