State Bank of India (SBIN): three strategies, 2019–2024.

Holding State Bank of India over these years returned 182%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.58. At their default settings none of the three rules beat that Sharpe. Tuned on the first 70% of the period and scored on the rest, none of the three held up.

Against holding it

Each rule at the workspace's default parameters, with 10 basis points of cost on every change of position, over 1,481 trading days.

Total returnSharpeWorst fall
Buy and hold182%0.58−59%
Momentum40%0.20−43%
MACD71%0.29−58%
Bollinger−22%−0.28−36%

On years it never saw

For each rule, every combination in its grid was run on the period up to 2023-03-09, the best was picked, and only that one was scored on what came after. How walk-forward works.

PickedSharpe, tunedSharpe, afterVerdict
Momentumlookback 10 · MA 1001.03−0.74failed
MACD16 / 34 / 90.98−0.78failed
Bollinger10 days · 2σ0.530.17overfit

Skill or luck

Three more readings of the same runs. A permutation p-value under 0.05 means the timing beat random timing; a probability of overfitting near 0.5 or above means picking by backtest did no better than picking at random; the rolling column slides the split through the period. What each one asks.

Permutation pProbability of overfittingAcross rolling windows
Momentum0.0400.91negative in every window
MACD0.0300.83depends on the window
Bollinger0.2140.01depends on the window

Hypothetical results on past data (2019-01-01 to 2024-12-31), from a script in the repository that re-runs every figure. Not a recommendation to buy, sell or trade State Bank of India or any other security.

Run it yourself

Each opens in the workspace on State Bank of India over the same dates, straight after sign-up if you are new. Change the ticker or the dates and the numbers change with them, which is the point.

Other India stocks: Reliance Industries · Tata Consultancy Services · HDFC Bank · Infosys · ICICI Bank · ITC · Bharti Airtel · Larsen & Toubro · Hindustan Unilever · Bajaj Finance · Asian Paints · Maruti Suzuki · Wipro · Nifty 50 · Nifty Bank · BSE Sensex. All of them.