EMA pullback (EMA-PULLBACK)

How the setup is identified

Waits for price to retrace to a moving average inside an established trend, then enters in the trend direction on the bounce.

Status and evidence

−$391 across seven months of 2026, negative in five of them. The single most expensive strategy in the set.

What we learned

This is the single most widely taught retail setup, and it is the most expensive strategy in our entire set. It required a strong multi-timeframe bias before firing, which should have been protective and was not.

The failure is instructive about the whole moving average family on gold. Three EMA-based strategies were tested and all three lost money; the pullback level that looks so clean in hindsight is, in real time, indistinguishable from the start of a reversal.