AVALONPLUS is a mechanical trading system for the S&P 500. Every rule is fixed in advance: when to enter, when to exit, how large the position may be. It is checked once per day after the close — not intraday, not by feel. You place the orders yourself; the system never trades for you.
Read the full methodology → 63 years of backtests · every assumption documented · hypothetical resultsA definition worth being precise about — the term is used for very different things.
A trading system is a fixed set of conditions that decides for you. It answers three questions mechanically: when to get in, when to get out, and how much to risk. Given the same market data, it produces the same decision today, tomorrow and in ten years — regardless of what the news says or how confident you feel.
That is the whole point. The costly mistakes in trading are rarely analytical; they come from overriding a plan under pressure — cutting a winner early, holding a loser too long, sizing up after a good run. A system removes the moment of discretion where those decisions get made.
What a trading system is not: it is not a forecast, not a guarantee, and not an automated bot. A mechanical system will produce losing trades and extended drawdowns by design. Its claim is not that it avoids losses, but that its behaviour is known in advance and can be examined on decades of historical data before you risk a cent.
End-of-day, four signal types, execution at the next open.
The system evaluates the S&P 500 after the close. No intraday monitoring, no screen time during market hours. If a signal fires, you act at the open of the next trading session.
Three long setups and one short setup, each with its own entry condition and stop distance. Only one position is open at a time. Long, short, or flat — there is no fourth state.
About 2–5 trades a year, and roughly a third of the time in the market. Most days the correct action is to do nothing. That is a feature of the rules, not a lull.
Contract count is derived from your capital and the setup's stop distance, not chosen by hand. The same arithmetic applies to every trade, in calm markets and in crashes — you can run it yourself in the position size calculator.
The signal is computed on the index; the instrument is your choice.
Signals are derived from the S&P 500 index itself (SPX). To act on them you can use the Micro E-mini future (MES) at $5 per index point, the E-mini (ES) at $50 per point. Futures only — a CFD on the index carries a larger weekend gap and daily financing. The MES contract is what makes the system usable for smaller accounts — it is the reason the strategy can be traded with roughly $10,000 rather than six figures.
Futures literacy is a prerequisite here, not an optional extra. Margin, leverage and quarterly rollover are learnable, but they are not something to discover with real money at stake.
Everything below is open to inspection without an account.
All performance figures are hypothetical backtest results. They are not a promise of future returns, and a positive historical record does not establish a future edge.
A systematic approach is a poor fit for several perfectly reasonable people.
If you want daily activity, this will bore you — the system is flat most of the year. If you intend to skip signals that feel wrong, you will get the drawdowns without the returns that are supposed to pay for them. If the money you would trade is needed within a few years, or a decline of around 30 percent would force you to stop, leveraged futures are the wrong vehicle regardless of the rules behind them.
Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Trade only with risk capital you can afford to lose entirely, and practise on a demo account first.
No. AVALONPLUS computes signals and shows them to you. It does not connect to a broker and never places an order. Every trade is entered by you.
In practice the terms overlap. "System" usually stresses that the rules are fully mechanical and repeatable; "strategy" is the broader word. AVALONPLUS is mechanical in that stricter sense.
Roughly $10,000 per MES contract, plus a reserve sized to the worst historical drawdown. Less than that and a normal losing streak becomes an account-ending event.
A few minutes after the close. On most days there is nothing to do — the system trades about 2–5 times a year.
Yes. The backtester in the app runs on 60+ years of data with your own settings, and the Strategy Report lays out the methodology behind it.
It takes the loss at the defined stop and moves on. Losing trades and multi-month drawdowns are part of the historical record and are documented rather than hidden.
The methodology is public and the backtester is free to use. Nothing about this system requires you to take its results on faith.
Read the Strategy Report → Or get the Android app — 30-day Premium trial, then a free plan.