Paper Trading Showdown: How Market Regime Trumps Strategy Design

This controlled paper trading tournament exposes why traditional backtesting can be dangerously misleading. While an AI confluence strategy achieved a narrow victory, the critical insight is that market regime—not strategy selection—determines trading success. Technical indicators like RSI and MACD excel in specific market conditions but catastrophically fail when regimes shift, demonstrating that traders need adaptive, market-aware strategies rather than static approaches.