Short the Bearish MA Close. Does it actually pay?

"Price closed below the 50-day MA today" is the bearish twin of the bullish MA close. The intuition is the same in reverse: when a stock can't hold its trend MA, momentum has shifted and the sellers have the upper hand. Cable news repeats it every time a famous index breaks down. The trouble is that almost nobody who quotes the signal has actually run it on the ticker they're shorting. Win rate? Average return? Worst-case loss after a gap up? Pure vibes.

So we built the test. Pick a ticker. Pick which MA you want to use as the trigger (anything from 5-day to 200-day). Set a profit target and a stop loss. The tool walks every bar in the historical record, fires a short on the day price first closes below that MA after being above, exits on whichever happens first (your profit target as a price drop or your stop loss as a price rise), and shows you the result trade by trade plus the equity curve next to a passive buy-and-hold benchmark.

The Bearish MA Closes tool is the answer to "does the bearish MA-cross signal actually pay" 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 four controls: Short Below (the MA length, anywhere from 5 to 500 bars), Profit Target (5–50%, default 10%), Stop Loss (5–50%, default 5%), and MA Alignment (No Filter, or Below Longer MAs). A one-click Find Best Moving Average button scans every length from 5 to 200 and snaps the stepper to whichever produced the highest CAGR under your other settings. For shorts, the profit target is the % drop below entry that closes the trade green, and the stop loss is the % rise above entry that closes it red.

The main panel returns five stat cards plus a collapsible trade log listing every individual short by entry date, entry price, exit date, exit price, days held, exit reason (target or stop), and return. Underneath, an equity curve compares your strategy's compounded short returns to a passive buy-and-hold of the same ticker, and a Trade Entries & Exits price chart plots every trigger directly on the price line so you can see exactly where the strategy went short and covered across the whole history.

Why each parameter matters

The MA-cross is asymmetric for shorts. Markets drift up over the long run, so blindly shorting on every bearish MA close is a losing strategy for most tickers. The point of the tool is to find the ticker / MA / exit combination where shorting historically still held an edge, and to reject the combinations that don't.

Short Below (MA length)

Shorter MAs trigger faster but get whipsawed by noise on the short side, where the dreaded "rip your face off" rallies tend to hit your stop loss before the move plays out. Longer MAs avoid the chop but you give up the early breakdown. The 50-day is a common reference. The 200-day is more of a regime indicator (a close below it often coincides with bear-market regimes).

Profit Target and Stop Loss

Shorts have asymmetric risk: capped downside profit (price can't go below zero), uncapped upside loss (a short squeeze can melt up 50%+ in days). Your stop loss matters more here than on the long side. Tight stops (3–5%) protect against squeezes but get hit on noise. Wide stops (10%+) ride bigger drawdowns but also tolerate the kind of bounces that often mark real bottoms.

MA Alignment

A bearish 50-day cross looks like a clean short, but if the 200-day MA is sloping up, the broader trend says you're shorting against gravity. The Below Longer MAs filter requires the selected MA to be below every standard longer MA before any short fires. Trade count drops, but the trades that fire are inside a stack of confirming downtrends.

All four controls compound. A 50-day Short Below with a 10%/5% target/stop and Alignment turned on produces a totally different short-trade log than the same MA with no filter. 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.