Buy or short the 52-week low. Bounce or breakdown?

A new 52-week low splits traders into two camps. The trend-followers say the breakdown has just begun and the only sensible play is to short the falling knife. The mean-reverters say capitulation is the bottom and it's the moment to buy. Both camps are confident; both can't be right on every ticker. The only honest answer is to walk every prior 52-week-low close in the historical record and see what actually happened next.

So we built the test. Pick a ticker. Pick a direction (Short or Long). Set a profit target and a stop loss. The tool walks every bar in the historical record, fires an entry on every day the close prints a fresh 52-week low (and the prior bar's close was above), exits on whichever happens first (your profit target or stop loss), and shows you the result trade by trade. An equity curve sits next to a buy-and-hold line so you can see whether the play actually beat sitting still.

The 52-Week Lows tool is the answer to "bounce or breakdown" without the hand-waving.

Pick a ticker from the pills (SPY, QQQ, IWM, AAPL, NVDA, TSLA, PLTR are pre-loaded; the More dropdown adds AMD, AMZN, GLD, GOOGL, META, MSFT, NFLX, SLV; or type any symbol). The Parameters sidebar gives you three controls: Direction (Short the breakdown or Long the bounce), Profit Target (5–50%, default 10%), and Stop Loss (5–50%, default 5%). Entry is fixed: every fresh 52-week-low close fires a position on the close in the chosen direction.

The main panel returns five stat cards plus a collapsible trade log listing every individual trade by entry date, entry price, exit date, exit price, days held, exit reason (target or stop), and return. Underneath, an equity curve compounds your strategy's per-trade returns and overlays a buy-and-hold curve on the same ticker, and a Trade Entries & Exits price chart plots every 52-week-low trigger directly on the price line.

Why each parameter matters

52-week lows are asymmetric across tickers. Strong-trend names tend to print 52w lows in clusters during real bear markets, then bounce hard once the dust settles. Weak names tend to make a string of new lows over years, with bounces that fail. The tool's two real knobs (Direction and Exits) are what you use to find which kind of name you're trading.

Direction

The Direction toggle changes the entire question. Short mode asks "does the breakdown continue?" Long mode asks "is the low the buy?" On the same ticker with the same exits, these two backtests can produce radically different equity curves. If the long-side equity beats the short-side equity, the ticker tends to bounce off lows; if the short-side beats long, momentum tends to extend. Either answer is useful, and the tool gives you both.

Profit Target

Tighter targets (5–8%) cycle capital faster but cap upside on the rare blow-off bounce or breakdown. Wider targets (15–30%) ride the move longer at the cost of more open trades sitting around. The trade log lets you see how often the target actually fires vs how often the stop saves the day.

Stop Loss

52w-low entries can move violently against you in either direction (a long can be stopped out by a sharp continuation lower; a short can be stopped out by a vertical face-ripping bounce). Tight stops (3–5%) protect against whippy reversals but get hit on noise. Wide stops (8–15%) tolerate the wobble at the cost of bigger single-trade losses. The Worst Trade card tells you what the wider stop actually cost.

All three controls compound. Long with 10%/5% on SPY produces a totally different trade log than Short with 10%/5% on the same ticker. Both are valid; both tell you something different. The tool lets you stress-test which combination historically held an edge on the ticker you trade.