A strategy is a contract, not a feeling¶
One-liner: A strategy must state four things — when trading is allowed, how you exit when wrong, what you risk on this trade, and when it ends. “Buy the golden cross” alone is not a strategy.
Wrong vs right¶
| Wrong | Right |
|---|---|
| “Buy the golden cross, feels like trends make money.” | “Only go long when the close is above the 50-day line and it just crossed above the 200-day line; exit when it breaks the 50-day line; if any window has negative CAGR, or the chop window draws down deeper than the trend window, this sentence is void.” |
A feeling cannot be re-run or falsified. A contract can: it pins down the boundary between “trade” and “don’t trade”, and pins down “what to do when wrong”, so a backtest can tell you what this sentence looks like in bear, bull, and recent windows.
How this repo uses it¶
The MA golden-cross practice sentence fills every box: mechanism, expected regime, contract, falsification, landing. The machine YAML and the hand-written checklist are the same sentence. When the backtest does not pass, read the report and write the same-sentence conclusion, instead of making a “this time is different” version that night.
See Five boxes · repo example in README_CN.md.