The golden cross is one of the best-known long-term trend signals: the 50-day moving average crossing above the 200-day. Ice Juice Trading's Golden Cross template automates it on your own Alpaca account — it buys the cross and exits on the "death cross" (the 50-day falling back below the 200-day). You set the risk limits; it runs on paper first. No code.
A golden cross happens when a shorter moving average crosses up through a longer one — classically the 50-day over the 200-day — and is widely read as a shift from a downtrend or range into a longer-term uptrend. The mirror image, the 50-day crossing back below the 200-day, is the "death cross" and is the natural exit. It's a slow, trend-following signal: it won't catch the exact bottom, but it aims to keep you on the right side of a big move and out of the worst declines.
Enter when the 50-day moving average crosses above the 200-day moving average.
Exit on the death cross — when the 50-day crosses back below the 200-day.
That's the entire rule; the discipline is in sizing and sticking with it. Every knob is yours to set: dollars per position, stop-loss %, maximum open positions, and profit-taking — or point the same cross at your own basket of tickers.
Golden-cross strategies do their best work in markets that trend cleanly for months at a time, riding the bulk of a sustained advance. Their weakness is chop: in a sideways, whipsawing market the averages can cross back and forth, producing false starts and small losses. Because a real cross is rare, you also get relatively few signals — which is worth keeping in mind when you read any backtest of it.
In our own 3-year backtest, the built-in Golden Cross template won 60.7% of 122 trades — but that is a deliberately small sample (a golden cross just doesn't fire often), the results are hypothetical, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Treat that as a starting point, not a promise: use the built-in backtester to run it over history on your own basket, then paper-trade it live on simulated money before risking anything real.
Automate the golden cross on your Alpaca account →
Explore all seven built-in strategies — including the MACD Cross, Trend Rider (momentum), and the Dip Buyer (mean reversion) — or compare plans and pricing (free paper trading included).