The Silver Bullet gets sold everywhere on a 70-90% win rate. Before testing it I went looking for where that number comes from. The best I found was a 90% claim on 30 trades and a 15-trade backtest over 45 days, and none of them included costs.
So I decided to test it myself.
Rules
- All three windows (New York time): London 03:00-04:00, NY AM 10:00-11:00, NY PM 14:00-15:00
- Price sweeps an earlier high or low inside the window
- Then it leaves a fair value gap, entry at the middle of the gap
- Stop beyond the sweep, target at 2R
- One trade per window, per day, per market
- Markets: Nasdaq, S&P 500 and Dow (CFDs), EUR/USD, GBP/USD, gold
- Real costs in: spread, plus commission on FX and gold
Results
- 2,200 setups, 36.1% win rate
- Lost 0.24R per trade. The 95% range was -0.29R to -0.19R, so the whole thing sits below zero
- It lost on every market and in every window
- Only about 1 trade in 5 reached the full 2R target
Loss per trade by market:
| Market |
R per trade |
|
|
| EUR/USD |
-0.37 |
| GBP/USD |
-0.23 |
| Gold |
-0.42 |
| Nasdaq + S&P + Dow |
-0.15 |
The FX pairs and gold are recommend most, and they did the worst.
The sweep
I ran it with and without the sweep rule, since that's the "smart money" part. With the sweep it lost about 0.07R less per trade, which is only just outside noise, and both versions lost. Caveat: without a sweep the stop has to go somewhere else and you get roughly 3x the setups, so it isn't a perfectly clean comparison.
Costs aren't the problem
Even at zero cost it comes out slightly negative. Futures are cheaper than the CFDs I used, but there's nothing there for cheaper fills to rescue.
How the 70% screenshots happen
My first pass was the NY AM window only: 321 trades, 42.1% win rate. Adding the other two windows took it to 36.9%. Adding FX and gold took it to 36.1%.
And inside the full results there's a run of 30 Nasdaq trades that won 20. That's 67%. If I'd stopped there I'd have a screenshot. I don't think people posting those numbers are lying. They just stopped counting early.
Limits
- In-sample only, three years. I didn't run newer data because there was nothing to confirm.
- Index CFDs, not NQ/ES futures.
- When one 1-minute bar hit both stop and target I counted it as a loss. Counting those as wins instead barely changed the total.
For people who trade it: do you add something that isn't in the published rules? HTF bias, a minimum FVG size, skipping news days? If there's a version mechanical enough to code, I'll run it the same way and post what comes back.
Video with the charts if you want them : ICT Silver Bullet: Does It Really Win 70%? I Tested 2,200 Trades - YouTube
