Does the “90% win rate” trading strategy work? We tested it

Trading videos love a “90% win rate” strategy. The claim is usually true: these setups really do win most of their trades. The question nobody asks on camera is whether they make money. So we built the classic version and backtested it on three years and eight months of real crypto futures data, with fees, slippage and funding included.

The strategy

Almost every high-win-rate setup has the same shape: buy a dip, take a small profit, allow a wide stop.

• Only trade in an uptrend: the price is above its 200-candle EMA.
• Buy the dip: the 14-candle RSI drops below 30.
• Take profit at +1%.
• Stop loss at −8%.
• Long only, the whole account per trade, no leverage. January 2023 to September 2026.

The results

So the win rate was real: 84% to 96%. But two of the four lost money, the best made 18.6% in over three and a half years, and simply holding the coin beat every one of them by a mile.

Why winning 93% of the time wasn’t enough

On Bitcoin’s 15-minute chart the strategy took 76 trades. 71 hit the +1% target and 5 hit the stop. After fees, the average win was about +0.87%. The average loss was about −8.2%.

That is the trade-off hiding inside every high win rate: you get it by taking profits early and letting losses run. The winning percentage looks wonderful. The money doesn’t.

Costs made it worse. Those 76 trades paid $812 in fees and $297 in funding on a $10,000 account. With a profit target of only 1%, the fees take a big bite out of every win.

How the same test can look twice as good

We ran the exact same rules again the way many tools do by default: filling each trade at the price that gave the signal, with no fees and no funding. The result jumped from +18.6% to +33.6%. Nothing about the strategy changed. Only the honesty of the test did. If a backtest you’re shown doesn’t say how it handles fills and costs, assume the flattering way.

To be fair to it

The strategy was only in a trade 0.4% to 11% of the time, so it risked far less than holding did, and the money could have been doing something else in between. That’s a real point in its favour. It still doesn’t turn a few percent a year into the returns these videos imply.

What to look at instead of the win rate

• Average win against average loss. A 40% win rate is excellent if the wins are three times the losses.
• Profit factor: total won divided by total lost. Under 1 loses money; this strategy ranged from 0.55 to 2.40.
• Buy-and-hold over the same period. The bar every strategy has to clear.
• The worst drop, and the number of trades: under about 30, it could be luck.

More on reading results in how to backtest a trading strategy for free.

See every trade

Each backtest is public. Open one to see the full report, every trade on the chart, and month-by-month results.

Test a variation yourself

Wider target, tighter stop, a different coin: describe it and see what changes.