Testing, Testing, Testing... RSI vs. MA Crossover on Hold

I was testing my theory on whether or not RSI could beat a Moving Average (MA) Crossover in terms of early entry and less false signals, when I got sidetracked by working out the most suitable MA Crossover settings for EUR/USD exchange. I made it so that for every signal I would enter a trade and close my previous trade (signal-to-signal). The results I came up with rather poor. My favorite MA combo's were 5/8 and 5/13, and both did not perform well on the 15 minute timeframe or the daily timeframe (I chose these two timefames because I would use them the most).

The both 5/8 MA and the 5/13 MA Crossover's did produce a profit on the daily timeframe, and this profit does include spread and swap price. The 15 minute timeframe, however, did not produce profit if the spread and swap price were include. So one could make a cautious assumption that a MA Crossover does not fair too well in intraday charts, but rather in daily, weekly, and monthly charts. 

Now, this does not mean that MA Crossover could not work for intraday charts. For my purposes I hoping to find a indicator that doesn't require any or very little filtration. Currently I'm reading the book Millioniare Traders by Kathy Lien and Boris Schlossberg, and they talk with a man who has made good use of the 5/13 MA Crossover on 30 minute charts. So unless the man was lying it would seem that it is possible to work with MA Crossover's in intraday charts. No doubt the man applied other methods than just a MA Crossover, but unfortunately it was not mentioned in any sort of detail.        

RSI vs. MA crossover

I was looking at an old post of mine that talks about the 5/8 Moving Average (MA) Crossover. It looked pretty good on my picture the position of each arrow the MA Crossover displayed, so I took another look at and compared it to some of the indicators I've been creating. I tried the Advanced RSI indicator, which displays arrows on the chart at given trigger level, and it seem the RSI out performed the 5/8 MA Crossover.

I do not have stats to back my conclusion, that's why I`m writing this in the general news section of my blog. But I did do a visual backtest for the comparison of the two indicators, and Advanced RSI won the day with fast entry/exit points and fewer false signals. At some point I`ll be posting the Advanced RSI indicator, but I need to make a few more adjustments before I`m satisfied with it.

So, for now if you are using MA Crossovers, you might want to compare it with RSI level triggers. You might get better results....