Any trader who has suffered a prolonged losing streak has probably thrown up their hands at some point and said, “I’d be more successful if I just randomly entered trades!” This might invoke images of monkeys throwing darts at the newspaper stock listings, but it’s not such an absurd idea. Is entering the market at the right time truly as important as everyone thinks?

To find out, the following study examines a strategy that enters trades randomly, but exits using specific rules based on x-day highs and lows, moving averages, the relative strength index (RSI), profit targets, and stop-losses.

Choosing different exit points for a strategy affects its performance more than you might expect. Comparing a strategy with defined trade rules to one without is a useful test of its real-world durability. The analysis uses daily prices of four futures contracts — crude oil (CL), soybeans (S), Euro (EC), and E-Mini S&P 500 (ES) — over the past five years.