minervini trend backtest

What the numbers mean

This is a trend-follower with the brakes taken off the winners: there is no take-profit and no maximum holding period, so a position stays open until price closes back under its 50-day average or the 8% stop is hit. That asymmetry defines the return profile. Most trades end small and red — the stack of averages breaks not long after it forms — while a minority of positions ride for months and carry the entire record. A low win rate here is the design, not a defect.

Requiring the 50-day above the 150-day above the 200-day means the trend must already be well established before anything is bought, so entries are structurally late and exits give back part of every top. The RSI filter above 55 thins out names that are technically aligned but going nowhere. Because the exit is a moving average rather than a fixed percentage, positions get room to shake — and that room shows up as genuine peak-to-trough drawdown. With a fifth of the account per name and five slots, one megacap's bad quarter is visible in the whole curve.

Over the window shown, this rule set ends higher than it began, so the interesting question is shape rather than sign. Read the profit factor beside the win rate — the gap between them is the entire mechanism. Then set the maximum drawdown against the annualized figure and ask whether you would have kept taking signals through the worst stretch, because the record assumes you did.