BUY SUPPORT OR BUY THE BREAKOUT?
Most traders have a favorite: buy the dip at support, or chase the breakout above resistance. We stopped guessing and back-tested both using altFINS API (Signal Feed) and Claude (you can too).
We back-tested 5 support & resistance strategies on 74 large-cap coins from 22 Sep to 23 Oct 2026. See the results in the report.
We held every trade for 3, 5 or 10 days and took 0.2% fees off every trade. It wasn’t an easy month: BTC fell 5.8% and ETH fell 13.3%.
The short answer: both work, but not with the same holding period.
▶ altFINS CEO Richard walks through every strategy we tested.
WHAT ACTUALLY MADE MONEY
Approaching Support (Long): +2.4% per trade in 3 days. The bounce worked, but it faded fast. By day 10 it had turned into a loss.
Resistance Breakout (Long): +5.0% per trade in 10 days. It paid more with every extra day held, even while the market fell.
Support Breakout (Short): +2.2% in 10 days. It lost money in the first 3 days, then won 77% of trades by day 10.
For comparison, buying every coin every day lost 2.1% over 10 days.
THE NUMBER THAT MATTERS: RETURN ON CAPITAL
Average profit per trade doesn’t tell you how hard your money worked. So we also measured return on the capital each strategy needed ($1,000 per trade).
Approaching Support returned +10.0% on capital in just 3 days. It also tied up the least money, because short trades free your capital quickly. Resistance Breakout was the steadiest earner: +8.6% at 5 days and +7.4% at 10 days.
THE TRAP: A HIGH WIN RATE THAT STILL LOSES
Approaching Resistance (Short) won up to 62% of trades and still lost money at every holding period.
Most of its trades were small wins. But when a coin pushed through resistance instead of turning down, the losses were up to twice the size of the wins.
The opposite happened with Resistance Breakout: only 36% of trades won, yet it made +5.0% per trade. The average win (+29.8%) was more than 3 times the average loss.
The lesson: don’t judge a strategy by its win rate. Check how big the wins are compared with the losses.
YOUR PLAYBOOK FROM THIS TEST
Support bounce? Take profits early. The edge was strongest at 3 days.
Breakout? Give it time. The 10-day hold beat the 3-day hold every time.
Shorting a support breakdown? Expect a retest first. Price often bounces back to the broken level before it continues down.
Shorting into resistance? Use a stop. Without one, a few short squeezes wiped out many small wins.
WHERE TO FIND THESE FILTERS ON ALTFINS
All 5 strategies are ready-made filters. There’s nothing to set up.
Crypto Screener → Pre-set Filters → Strategy Blocks → choose Approaching Support, Resistance Breakout, Support Breakout or Approaching Resistance.
👉 Open the Crypto Screener to see which coins are approaching support or breaking resistance right now.
Want the signals the moment they fire? The same signals are in the Signals Feed. That’s the feed we used to rebuild every trade in this test.
New to support and resistance? Read our guide: Support and Resistance: The Complete Guide for Traders
READ THE FULL REPORT
The 15-page report has every number behind this email:
win rates, profit factors and drawdowns for all 3 holding periods
the size of the average win and loss for each strategy
a strategy-by-strategy breakdown
the full method, so you can replicate the test
Have an altFINS API key? You can rerun this test yourself with the altFINS API and an AI model like Claude.
One month in one falling market: treat this as an early signal, not a verdict. These are back-tested, hypothetical results after a 0.2% fee per trade, without slippage. Past performance does not guarantee future results. This is not investment advice.