Fifty cointegrated US equity pairs, screened from 34,500 candidates and validated over five years, loaded into Ultimate Alpha 3 in one click. Every free trial gets the current vintage. This page shows how the fifty are built, the parameters they are backtested on, and what they did in the backtest.
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Six stages of statistical and fundamental filtering.
The universe of US-listed equities is enormous — but only a fraction are tradeable as a pair, and only a fraction of those clear our statistical, backtest, fundamental and diversification filters. Which leg is long and which is short is decided by the signal, so every candidate pair is tested once.
Equity and candidate-pair counts are from the September 2026 screen. The statistical stage applies an Augmented Dickey–Fuller cointegration test (p-value 0.10 or less), a 50%+ correlation target and the backtest thresholds listed below; the fundamental stage is a hand review for a genuine economic link between the two businesses. A few Wild Cards that miss the statistical filters but show exceptional five-year backtests are added for further study.
| Closed trades, 5 yrs / last 12 mo | 817 / 178 |
| Win rate, 5 yrs / last 12 mo | 89.4% / 93.8% |
| Average win / average loss | $384 / –$271 |
| Median days in trade | 16 |
| Return on $100k, avg p.a. / last 12 mo | 50.3% / 62.8% |
| Year by year, 2022 → 2026 | 40 · 47 · 52 · 50 · 63% |
| S&P 500, p.a. / last 12 mo | 13.3% / 17.9% |
| Alpha per month vs S&P 500 | 2.75% / 3.74% |
| Leverage, average / peak | 0.98x / 2.67x |
| Worst realised drawdown | 1.8% |
| Tail scenario, 10% shock at peak | –26.7% |
| Out-of-sample, 9 carry-over pairs | 27 wins / 2 losses |
$5k legs, profits swept (no compounding), after 0.10%/leg costs and margin interest. S&P 500 = SPY with dividends reinvested. Backtest results, not promises.
We measure the vintage the conservative way: a $100,000 account, fixed $5,000 legs (5% of equity; 10% when the second layer fires), profits swept as made so returns never compound, after 0.10% per leg commission and slippage and IBKR margin interest. The S&P 500 comparison is buy-and-hold with dividends reinvested — it compounds, the pairs are not allowed to.
On that basis the fifty produced 817 closed trades over five years, a win rate of 89.4%, and an average return of 50.3% a year on $100,000 — positive in every twelve-month period, including 2022, when the S&P 500 lost 16.6%. The book ran at 0.98x average leverage and never exceeded 2.7x.
The four-page tear sheet has the year-by-year table, the equity curve against SPY, the leverage profile, a Monte Carlo risk-of-ruin analysis, the tail scenario a backtest cannot show, and a partial out-of-sample check on the nine pairs carried over from earlier vintages.
Start your free trial — load these 50 pairs Open the tear sheet (PDF, 4 pages) →
Unfiltered raw signals on Yahoo! Finance close data. Margin interest at average Effective Fed Funds Rate plus 1.5%.
NB: These example equities pairs are provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investment advice. It should not be assumed that trading using the parameters demonstrated by the Software will be profitable and will not result in losses. Any performance results prepared by www.pairtradefinder.com are not based on actual trading of securities but on a hypothetical trading account. Hypothetical performance results have many inherent limitations. Your actual results will vary. Please see our full Terms & Disclaimer.
You have just read how the September 2026 Top 50 are built and what they did in the backtest. The fastest way to judge them is to watch them signal on your own screen. Every free trial includes the current vintage, full Ultimate Alpha 3 access, the white paper and the webinar.
