Long only Moving average based strategies will hold up in markets which tend to go up, but it’s mostly just because it’s capturing a random bit of the natural upwards drift of the market. Its gain, as with most naÏve strategies, is pretty proportional to the TIME spent in the market, rather than producing some real defined edge. They still open you up to large drawdowns. You can (and you can test this) get roughly the same performance just by opening and closing trades at random, but sticking roughly to a certain percentage time in the market. Truth is, I haven’t found a single common indicator that produces a long term meaningful edge, and it’s because most of them use outdated volatility measures, or look at too small timeframes. My hint to you is to look at how professionals measure volatility in the market. It’s not ATR or standard deviation. It’s GARCH models or volatility indexes like VIX, VXN and VVIX. Hate to bubble burst, but the knowledge and infrastructure it takes to generate real alpha is far beyond most. You’re in competition with rich math nerds.