Indicator · Ichimoku
Ichimoku Cloud Backtester
Ichimoku is five lines, and the part that trips up every backtest is that some of them are displaced — projected forward or shifted back in time. That displacement is exactly where hindsight sneaks into a manual test, and exactly why a strict candle-by-candle replay is the only fair way to measure it.
The displacement problem
The cloud is drawn ahead of price, which means at any moment part of what's on your screen describes candles that haven't printed. Scrolling a chart backwards, that is trivially fine — you already know what happened. Trading it live, the cloud ahead of price is a projection built only from what's already closed.
A replay reproduces the live condition exactly: at each step, everything is computed from revealed candles only. If your Ichimoku strategy looked excellent when you scrolled it and merely acceptable in replay, the gap between those two impressions was the displacement, and it is the most useful thing this test will teach you.
Which Ichimoku signal are you actually testing?
There are at least four in common use: price breaking through the cloud, the tenkan/kijun cross, the cloud itself twisting, and the lagging span clearing past price. They fire at different times and have completely different frequencies. Testing "Ichimoku" as one thing produces a number that describes none of them.
Pick one, define it as a sentence, log a few hundred instances. Then pick the next. Writing rules you can backtest covers getting that sentence precise enough to be countable.
Frequently asked questions
Are the Ichimoku settings editable?
Yes — the conversion and base periods are editable from the chart legend, so the classic 9/26/52 and the crypto-community variants are both testable.
Does the cloud project forward correctly in replay?
Yes. At each revealed candle it's built only from candles that have already closed, and projected ahead exactly as it would be live — no value on screen is ever derived from a bar you haven't been shown.
Is Ichimoku free in CRTLAB?
Yes, along with every other built-in indicator, on all 21 free markets.
Open USDJPY with the Ichimoku cloud on
One click — hourly yen, the full cloud plotted, replaying candle by candle.
Open the chart →