Can good exits rescue a coin-flip entry?

Tom Basso's well-known coin-flip experiment, repeated by others since, picks long or short at random and still makes money on diversified daily futures thanks to its exits and position sizing. Does the same hold intraday on the markets our users trade? In other words, do the exits, costs and trade count carry the result on their own?

• NQ, ES, gold, oil and Bitcoin futures; 1, 5 and 15-minute bars; 309 sessions, 1 Sept 2025 to 5 Nov 2026.
• A coin flip picks long or short. Whenever flat, we enter at the next bar's open. No new trade in the last 30 minutes; anything still open closes at the session end.
• Seven exits sized on the 14-bar ATR: stop and target pairs (1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/1), trailing stops of 2 and 4 ATR, and hold to the close.
• Costs as in our Build tool: one tick on entry and on stop or time exits, plus the round-turn fee. When one bar touches both stop and target, the stop counts first.
• Each setup ran 200 times with different coin flips.

100 of the 105 setups lose money on average after costs.

On 1-minute bars every setup loses in every one of the 200 runs: costs are too large next to the moves.

Only one setup made money in both halves of the year: NQ, 15-minute bars, a wide trailing stop. One cell out of 105, on one market, in one strong year, is not an edge.

The daily-futures result rests on trends that last weeks: a trailing exit lets a lucky entry ride them. Intraday, NQ and ES trend only slightly over hours, and gold, oil and Bitcoin tend to snap back. There is little trend for a random entry to catch, and costs are paid on every trade.

An exit only helps when it matches how the market moves at that time frame. A good stop and target cannot make a random entry pay intraday. The entry still has to earn its place, which our note on ideas against a coin flip tests.

About 14 months, one contract per trade, no position sizing. Trailing stops are tested here for research; they are not an exit in our app. This is the past, not a promise it repeats.

Simulated results on past market data from 2025 and 2026. Research only, not trading signals or advice. Past results do not promise future ones; see the hypothetical performance disclosure at the bottom of the page.