Buy the Bullish MA Close. Does it actually pay?

"Price closed above the 50-day MA today" is one of the most common bullish setups retail traders look at. The intuition is straightforward: when a stock can claim a fresh close above a meaningful moving average, momentum has shifted and the buyers have the upper hand. The catch is that almost nobody who quotes the signal has actually run it on the ticker they're holding. Win rate? Average return? Drawdown vs buy and hold? 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 an entry on the day price first closes above that MA after being below, exits on whichever happens first (your profit target or stop loss), and shows you the result trade by trade plus the equity curve next to a passive buy-and-hold benchmark.

The Bullish MA Closes tool is the answer to "does the bullish 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: Buy Above (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 Above 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.

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 compares your strategy's compounded growth 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 bought and sold across the whole history.

Why each parameter matters

The MA-cross is not one signal. The 5-day cross fires dozens of times a year on the same ticker; the 200-day cross fires once or twice a decade. The trade logs and win rates from those two are not comparable in any meaningful way. The tool exposes the full range so you can find what actually works on the ticker you own.

Buy Above (MA length)

Shorter MAs trigger faster but get whipsawed by noise. Longer MAs avoid the chop but you give up the early move. The classic 50-day MA is a common sweet spot for swing traders. The 200-day is more of a regime indicator (a close above it means the stock is in a long-term uptrend). Use Find Best Moving Average to let the data pick a length for you.

Profit Target and Stop Loss

Tight exits (e.g. 5%/3%) cycle capital faster but leave a lot of trend on the table. Wide exits (e.g. 25%/12%) ride bigger moves but expose you to deeper drawdowns. The trade log lets you see how often each exit fires, and the equity curve tells you which combination compounds better over the full history.

MA Alignment

A bullish 50-day cross looks great in isolation, but if the 200-day MA is sloping down, the broader trend says the rally is fighting gravity. The Above Longer MAs filter requires the selected MA to be above every standard longer MA before any entry fires. Trade count drops, but the trades that fire are inside a stack of confirming trends.

All four controls compound. A 50-day Buy Above with a 10%/5% target/stop and Alignment turned on produces a totally different 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.