100 Free Trading Strategies (Backtested)
A collection of rule-based trading systems for systematic traders
In this article, we give you 100 free trading strategies.
Whether you’re just starting or sharpening your approach, having a broad set of strategy ideas with clear rules and logic can make all the difference. As we have mentioned often on our blog and website, as a systematic trader, you need several strategies to create uncorrelated strategies. This means different time frames, assets, and market directions. Hopefully, you can get some ideas from this webpage.
Below is a comprehensive overview of over 100 free, rule‑based trading ideas drawn from a large library of backtested strategies. They span markets, timeframes, assets, and styles.
You can use this as inspiration or as a checklist to backtest and adapt for your portfolio.
Please make sure you bookmark this article. We update continuously!
Indicator Trading Strategies
Indicator trading strategies are most used by beginners. That is not negative. However, very few backtest them. We do. Below, we list a few of the indicator trading strategies we have put to the test:
Swing Trading Strategies
Swing trading involves holding a tradable asset for several days or longer to capture short-term price movements, or “swings.”
It sits between day trading and long-term investing. Unlike day trading, you don’t close positions before the market closes. But unlike buy-and-hold investing, you’re not waiting years for returns: you’re aiming to profit from shorter-term price fluctuations.
Fixed Income and Bond Trading Strategies
Fixed income and bond strategies focus on investing in debt securities such as government and corporate bonds. These strategies aim to generate returns through interest payments, price changes, and yield differences across maturities or issuers. Many investors use fixed income strategies to seek stable income, diversify portfolios, and manage risk alongside equity investments.
Fixed income and bond trading strategies are often overlooked by equity traders. Bonds provide diversification and can have distinct trading opportunities:
Seasonal Trading Strategies
Seasonal trading strategies aim to profit from recurring patterns in market behavior tied to the calendar. These patterns are often driven by shifts in investor sentiment, institutional behavior, or tax-related flows at specific times of the year. Well-known examples include the Santa Claus Rally and the Turn of the Month effect.
Seasonal trading strategies are often uncorrelated to other strategies.
One classic example is the January Effect, which involves buying stocks toward the end of December and holding them through January, a period that has historically shown relative strength. Another widely cited pattern is “Sell in May and Go Away,” which suggests reducing equity exposure in May and re-entering the market in November to avoid the typically weaker summer months.
Just as nature follows seasonal cycles, financial markets often display recurring rhythms. Seasonal trading strategies attempt to identify and exploit these repeating tendencies.
We are particularly fond of seasonal patterns because of their persistence and logical underpinnings. There are many such effects in the stock market. In this section, we have documented around 50 of them. For those willing to dig deeper, there are numerous potentially tradable seasonal strategies waiting to be explored.
We provide you with some ideas:
Volatility Trading Strategies
Volatility trading strategies seek to profit from changes in market volatility rather than just price direction. These strategies often trade breakouts following low-volatility periods, or mean-reversion after volatility spikes.
Candlestick Trading Strategies
Candlestick charts are a way of visualizing price movements in financial markets. Each “candlestick” shows four key pieces of information for a given time period: the opening price, closing price, highest price, and lowest price.
The body of the candle represents the distance between the open and the close, while the wicks (or shadows) show how far the price moved above or below those levels during the period.
Traders use candlestick patterns to interpret market behavior and potential shifts in supply and demand. Certain formations, such as dojis, engulfing patterns, or hammers, are believed to signal possible reversals or continuations in price.
While many patterns are widely discussed in trading literature, their effectiveness can vary, which is why many traders test them with historical data before using them in a strategy. Mostly anecdotal evidence is used, but we have quantified all 75 candlestick patterns. You can get the code on our website shop.
Algorithmic Trading Strategies
Algorithmic trading strategies use predefined rules to buy and sell financial assets automatically. Instead of relying on intuition or discretionary decisions, these strategies are based on clear logic that can be tested on historical data.
By removing emotions and applying consistent rules, algorithmic trading aims to identify repeatable market patterns and execute trades systematically.
Algo trading strategies are normally automated:
Mean Reversion Trading Strategies
Mean reversion trading strategies have worked well for stocks and stock indices since S&P 500 futures trading started in 1982.
A mean-reversion strategy is based on the idea that price movements are temporary and that markets tend to return to an average level over time. In statistics, this concept is known as regression to the mean.
The logic is simple: while markets may trend in the short term, stock returns have historically followed a long-term upward trajectory. When prices deviate significantly from that trend, they may signal temporary overvaluation or undervaluation. For instance, an oversold asset often delivers stronger short-term returns than an overbought one.
A robust mean-reversion strategy accounts for the broader upward bias in the stock market and looks for buying opportunities when prices decline under otherwise supportive conditions. The expectation is that, like a stretched rubber band, prices will eventually snap back toward their average level.
From a statistical perspective, observations that fall in the extreme tails of a normal distribution are more likely to be temporary anomalies than permanent shifts. The assumption is that these extremes will, in most cases, move back toward the mean over time.
Since the expansion of derivatives markets in the early 1980s, mean reversion strategies have been particularly effective in US equities.
A typical mean reversion strategy has a high win rate. However, the average loser tends to be bigger than the average loser.
Here are a few mean reversion strategies:
Trend-Following Trading Strategies
Trend-following trading strategies are the opposite of mean reversion. Combining these two types is very smart. Trend strategies tend to have a low win rate, but that is offset by a very few big winners.
A trend trading strategy focuses on identifying and following the prevailing market direction. Traders often use tools like moving averages to define the trend: when the price is above the moving average, it indicates an uptrend, while a price below the moving average suggests a downtrend. The 200-day moving average is a widely used trend filter and is reportedly used by investors such as Paul Tudor Jones.
Other popular trend-following methods and indicators include the Golden Cross (and its counterpart, the Death Cross), the Supertrend Indicator, and the Fabian Timing model.
There are numerous ways to identify a trend, but it’s essential to backtest your approach to understand how it would have performed historically.
Trend following can deliver substantial profits, but it also comes with the risk of significant drawdowns, testing both strategy and trader alike.
Larry Connors Trading Strategies
Larry Connors is a famous research analyst. He has written several books and produced many trading systems.
Below, we have backtested a few of his systems:
High Win Rate Strategies
High win rate strategies don’t necessarily mean a profitable trading strategy (depending on the size of the losing trades).
However, a high win rate feels good, while a low win rate strategy might be hard to trade (mentally).
Bitcoin And Crypto Trading Strategies
Bitcoin and crypto trading strategies will most likely be harder to find in the future as the markets mature.
Because crypto markets trade 24/7 and can be highly volatile, systematic strategies help traders apply consistent rules and manage risk.
In our opinion, Bitcoin is not an easy asset to trade. Nevertheless, here are some trading ideas:
Price Action Trading Strategies
Price action trading strategies are a method of trading based purely on the movement of price on a chart, without relying on traditional indicators like RSI, MACD, or moving averages.
Price action trading strategies focus on analyzing historical price movements and chart patterns to identify potential trades, without relying on technical indicators. Candlestick patterns are a core element of price action, with the pin bar being a classic example signaling potential reversals.
Another common price action setup is the inside bar pattern, which consists of two bars where the second bar (the “inside bar”) is completely contained within the high and low of the preceding bar. Inside bars often appear during periods of market consolidation or just before a strong breakout.
At its core, price action is simply the movement of a security’s price and forms the basis of most technical analysis, including patterns like head and shoulders or double bottoms. Because price action trading is often discretionary, rather than strictly rule-based, we haven’t compiled an extensive list of quantifiable strategies in this category.
Nasdaq Trading Strategies
Normally, Nasdaq trading strategies can be employed for other stock indices as well. Nasdaq 100 is a fantastic trading vehicle. Just look at these strategies:
ETF Trading Strategies
ETF trading strategies allow diversified systematic play:
Sentiment Trading Strategies
Sentiment trading strategies are investment approaches that attempt to profit from shifts in market psychology rather than traditional fundamentals or pure price patterns. Instead of focusing on earnings, valuation metrics, or technical indicators alone, these strategies analyze how optimistic or pessimistic market participants are.
Sentiment can be measured in many ways: surveys (like the American Association of Individual Investors sentiment survey), positioning data such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Commitment of Traders (COT) reports, options activity (put/call ratios), volatility indexes like the CBOE Volatility Index, fund flows, or even news and social media data.
The core idea is simple: when sentiment becomes excessively bullish or bearish, markets often move in the opposite direction. Extreme optimism can signal that most buyers are already invested, leaving little fuel for further gains. Extreme pessimism can indicate capitulation, where selling pressure may be near exhaustion.
In short, sentiment trading strategies aim to identify crowd extremes and position for potential reversals — systematically and rule-based — to exploit the behavioral biases that drive markets.
Day Trading Strategies
Day trading strategies aim to capture short-term price movements within the same trading day. Positions are opened and closed before the market closes, meaning traders typically do not hold overnight risk. These strategies often rely on technical indicators, intraday momentum, and strict rules to manage entries, exits, and risk.
Day trading strategies are popular, but at least 90% of day traders lose money. You can do better by looking at the following strategies:
Gold Trading Strategies
Gold trading strategies focus on buying and selling gold and gold-related instruments to profit from price movements. Gold strategies are often used for diversification, hedging, or capturing short- and long-term opportunities in precious metals markets.
Gold trading strategies tend to break down. Gold is a hard asset to trade, but it has a tailwind over time from rising gold prices. Below is a gold trend-following strategy:
Oil Trading Strategies
Oil trading strategies tend to break down. It’s a hard commodity to trade. Anyway, we have a few strategies for you, but be careful!
Interest Rate Trading Strategies
Bonds influence the stock market - a lot:
Risk Management Strategies
There are many ways to manage risk: you can use a stop-loss, varying size based on volatility, and diversify across uncorrelated strategies. We strongly recommend the latter. Please read more about this in our articles:
Multi-Time Frame Trading Strategies
Multi-timeframe analysis and strategy is a trading approach where the same asset is analyzed across different time horizons to improve decision-making.
The concept is straightforward: a higher timeframe is used to determine the overall market direction, while a lower timeframe is used to optimize entries and exits.
In practice, the higher timeframe answers what to trade, while the lower timeframe answers when to trade.
Final Thoughts
This collection spans broad domains of trading thought. Not every approach will suit every trader or market condition, but having a structured idea base improves your edge. Always backtest and put the strategies into incubation later.
The next step is always to translate these ideas into precise rules, backtest results, and well‑defined risk controls before risking real capital. These 100 free trading strategies should provide you with some input!