Tactical asset allocation insights, strategy deep dives, and platform updates.
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Verdad's allocation leans against the credit cycle and adds a 200-day trend rule. Our backtest says it beats the S&P 500 on risk-adjusted return since 1980, that the trend rule does most of that work, and that HAA did the same job better.
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Our 3 tracked model portfolios lead the post: Simple Defensive Core did +1.3% in October 2026 (+1.5% YTD). Then the full board of 111 published strategies, with the month, year-to-date and 1-year return side by side, because the long view is the one that counts. YTD leaders, the leveraged corner, and the month's best and worst.
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A subscriber asked to see the leveraged versions we tested and left out, so I went back through them step by step. In 4 tests and in the 10 levered versions we list, leverage raised the return, deepened drawdowns and lowered the Sharpe ratio, even measured above cash. Here's what we tested, why we changed how we measure Sharpe, and how we now decide what gets listed.
David Varadi's new cluster risk parity reproduces, but its headline Sharpe ratios leave out cash. Above T-bills it trails a plain 60/40 since 1988, it beat 60/40 in one decade only, and its duplicate removal loosens on real ETFs. It's in the catalog anyway, with the numbers.
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SSO's fee is only part of what its 2x costs. Over the fund's whole life, its leverage cost 1.52% a year above the Fed funds rate, about what a 2x margin account paid at Interactive Brokers' first tier. Schwab's posted rate cost far more, and 2x bought once and never re-levered was force-sold on 12 days in 2008 and 2009.
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Zack Hughes's Trigger Ratchet adds leverage to a retirement portfolio after a crash and cuts spending at the same time. On corrected data his own January 2000 example runs out of money, but on US data since 1928 the trigger made a 5% withdrawal last in 93% of 30-year retirements, against 84% without it. It also fell as far as stocks alone, and it failed in Japan.
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Every BestFolio backtest charges 5 basis points a side on each trade, up to 3 times more when the portfolio has been volatile. I priced every trade of 201 strategy variants at real spreads and IBKR commissions: the backtests charge a median 0.25% a year, a $10,000 account pays about 0.17%, $100,000 0.06% and $1,000,000 0.06% to 0.12%.
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The November batch is live: new strategies, Stéphane Renevier's Adaptive Hedge among them, plus GGCEM, KDA and Trinity rebuilt to their authors' own rules. We also cover the October strategies we never announced.
We rebuilt Keller and van Putten's 2012 Flexible Asset Allocation from the paper and landed within half a point of its published result. What did not survive publication is the return: 12.69% a year up to 2012, 4.46% since, behind a plain 60/40.
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A member asked whether buying last year's winners each January, with a 35% stop and half the money in Treasuries, beats holding the market. Single stocks can't be tested without survivor-free data, so I ran it on US sector, country and Fidelity sector funds. Last year's best sector fund beat the sector average the next year 10 times in 26, and outside the 1990s tech run the rule did about the same as or worse than holding every fund in the group.
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Across 201 BestFolio variants, HAA Leveraged 2x is the only name in both the full-history CAGR and Sharpe top 10s. Measured above cash, Sharpe pushed 5 low-return, low-volatility strategies out of its top 10.
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I ran about 2,300 backtests on Buy the Dip's 6 different settings. The trend half sits on a plateau, the RSI half near a sharp peak, and filling at the next open instead of the close cost 5.9 points a year since 2010.
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A 3x fund pays about twice the overnight rate to borrow. Across 49 years of 3x S&P 500 returns, real and synthetic, the year's fed funds rate explained almost none of the result. The stock market's lead over cash and its volatility did, and the rough patches came while rates were climbing.
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An unlevered monthly rotation across US stocks, bonds, REITs, commodities and gold that holds the top 3. On its 53.7-year card it beat the US market's return by about 2 points a year with about two thirds of the volatility on month-end returns, and its worst fall repaired in 20 months instead of 53. The catch is long stretches behind a rising stock market.
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5 rules-based strategies, a spreadsheet for each, one check a month. $29 until 23 October.
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I tested 250 ballast sleeves with no equity in them, judged on their own, next to tactical strategies and next to plain stocks. The 3 lenses disagree, 1 candidate does well on all of them, and BestFolio now publishes 7 of them.
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We ran Kelly's 9Sig back to December 1986 with a 200-day moving average override into cash, and a 24-month-block bootstrap. Bare 9Sig falls below 1% of its peak in 41.7% of resampled histories. The override removes that entirely, costs 8 points of annual return in the window with no crash in it, and sits one grid step away from a setting that loses more than 90%.
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A community strategy that scores 10 funds, 8 of them leveraged, and marks down any holding that moves with the rest of the book. Our rebuild held the same funds as its author's own signal history in 126 of 136 months. Here is what the card shows, and why we publish both of its exits without crowning either.
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A community-built leveraged all-weather portfolio: 6 sleeves, each switched by its own trend rule, with a defensive ladder instead of a single hedge. The card starts in 1971 and shows the price of admission, a 47.81% fall into the October 1990 low that took 27 months to repair.
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Most commentary still treats high rates as bad news. For the next holder of long bonds, it is the opposite. With the 30-year Treasury at 5.56%, here is the math, from the starting yield to convexity, and where the case breaks.
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The VIX only decides how far back the momentum reading looks: 10 months when it is low, 3 when it is elevated, 1 in a crisis. Both published settings land near a 0.8 Sharpe over 35.6 years, and Top 2 gets within 0.01 of Top 1 with a shallower fall and nearly a third less turnover.
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Our 3 tracked model portfolios lead the post: the moderate blend did -3.0% in September 2026 (+0.2% YTD). Then the full board of 98 published TAA strategies plus the 200-Day SMA Trend reference model, with the month, year-to-date and 1-year return side by side, because the long view is the one that counts. YTD leaders, the leveraged corner, and the month's best and worst.
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A 5,000-path Classic 60/40 test shows why bootstrap settings can leave the middle unchanged while making the bad tail 24 percentage points worse.
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Why unpublished variants raise the bar for every published strategy, and what a fragile flag actually means.
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201 backtests share one withdrawal engine but not one history. Compare the disasters before comparing the rates.
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The October batch is live: 2 leveraged portfolios from r/LETFs, a momentum model that changes speed with the VIX, a five-fund rotation and Keller's Flexible Asset Allocation. The numbers are the ones on the strategy pages.
SPY, QQQ, QLD, and TQQQ took between 24 and 37 months to recover from the same 2021 peak, with leverage stretching both depth and time.
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The first version of our Behaviour Check flagged more than a third of strategies in a typical month. The cause was a hidden assumption that 6 months are 6 independent draws. Scoring whole 6-month windows against comparable history brought it to 3.5% of the strategies it can score.
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Why the years column sits beside every card, what a longer window adds, and what it quietly distorts.
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European twins trailed by 0.74 points a year with US signals. Recomputing from European quotes widened the gap to 4.8 points.
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Our last study argued most backtests are worth little. This is the strategy that answers the obvious follow-up, and it is not our best performer. It is the one with the most evidence per unit of complexity: 2 conditions, 52.5 years, positive returns through both the dot-com bust and the financial crisis.
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A Sharpe ratio says how large a strategy's risk-adjusted return was, not how consistently it was earned. We ran the Sharpe Stability Ratio across 173 published backtests. It resolves ties the Robustness score cannot, it does not reward inactivity, and it belongs to the window rather than the strategy: the steadiest strategies of the 2000s were the least steady of the 2010s.
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Same funds, same year, different worst case: what sampling frequency does to a maximum drawdown, recomputed from our own price data.
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Similar volatility, different bargains: 3 absolute trend gates against 1 relative gold-bond rule.
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A matched 41.8-year comparison shows how an asset-class trend filter and a concentrated sector ranker create very different drawdowns.
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A catalog audit shows orderly median risk differences across conservative, moderate, and aggressive labels, while exposing how much dispersion a single word can hide.
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How GPM scores 12 assets, scales its crash protection with breadth, and picks between IEF and short Treasuries. Rewritten in October 2026, when BestFolio's GPM moved to Keuning and Keller's published rules, which have no all-cash cliff.
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A volatility-scaled buffer gave a 200-day TQQQ gate room in calm markets and tightened the exit when turbulence was already high.
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A community-built leveraged portfolio with 2 trend gates: what they fix, what they cost, and the years that hurt.
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A reader called our flagship an overfitting masterpiece. So we ran the tests that could convict it: 700 parameter configurations, a deliberate cherry-pick, 60 random universes, and a post-publication study of 63 strategies. Our published settings ranked 2nd of 700, the pre-2019 ranking predicted nothing about what followed, and the decay evidence leans one way without proving it.
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A matched 52-year comparison finds that HAA's 2x variant beat 3x on CAGR, Sharpe, Sortino, and drawdown while using the same signals and turnover.
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VEA's return history stays fixed while its beta, size loading, and explained variance move sharply under US and developed-market factor sets.
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A year-by-year reproduction shows why a TIPS signal helped in rate shocks, stayed silent in 2008 and 2020, and barely changed the deepest drawdown.
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76.8 reconstructed years, a 4-branch macro rule, and why the proxy chain deserves as much scrutiny as the 17.16% CAGR.
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The strategy I'd show you first: a deflated Sharpe above 0.99 against 279 variants, a 0.96 Sharpe held for 38.8 years, crashes it sidestepped, and a just-shipped 1.5x version that turns $10,000 into $6.93M instead of $1.98M. Only 5% of members hold it.
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Our 3 tracked model portfolios lead the post: the conservative blend did +1.4% in August 2026 (+3.4% YTD). Then the full board of 93 published TAA strategies, with the month, year-to-date and 1-year return side by side, because the long view is the one that counts. YTD leaders, the leveraged corner, and the month's best and worst.
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Member portfolios and the deflated Sharpe leaderboard rank the same 175 variants almost independently: the correlation is 0.156, one popular pick sits far below our fragility cutoff, and 4 perfect scorers have no holders at all.
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Recorded inflation changed five century-scale withdrawal backtests and moved four binding retirement starts. Corrected figures, methodology and limitations.
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A threshold-based allocation rule can produce opposite decisions when one implementation uses total-return data and another uses price-only or unsettled prices.
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Five strategies join the BestFolio catalog today, led by David Varadi's Inflation Compass and its four-quadrant inflation read. The batch also carries our first community-credited strategy and a leveraged QLD variant wearing the strongest risk label we have ever put on a strategy page.
We separated the cash series used by a momentum signal from the cash return held by the portfolio. Across one fixed rule, that accounting choice moved CAGR by 0.87 percentage points.
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On matched windows SCHG and QQQM run a 0.978 correlation with identical drawdowns. SPMO is the only one running a strategy, and it cuts both ways: -10% in 2022 while the pair lost a third, then late to the 2023 bounce.
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Golden Ratio Dual Gate compounds at 20.5% over the full backtest, yet its rolling 5-year outcomes ranged from 12.2% to 33.0% depending on the start month. We replayed all 160 eligible starts, lump sum and DCA, from the production series.
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We added 1 and 2 business sessions to GEM, HAA and BAA after their canonical fill at the signal close. HAA and BAA each lost about 1 CAGR point at the 2-session delay.
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A subscriber rebuilt our GGCEM backtest on as-published OECD data and it fell apart. We verified it, published the real-time comparison, and pulled the strategy from our rankings.
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Treasuries failed in 2 of 5 fast equity selloffs. We tested whether the prior 60-day stock-bond correlation warned us. The rule caught 2 cases out of 5 and fired constantly in calm markets.
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Every strategy on BestFolio carries a Robustness score: the probability its Sharpe is a real edge rather than the luckiest pick among the 202 variants we tested, released or not. Here's how it works, which of our own strategies it flags, and why every score just dropped a notch.
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Our 3 tracked model portfolios lead the post: the conservative blend did -0.4% in July 2026 (+1.9% YTD). Then the full board of 69 published TAA strategies, with the month, year-to-date and 1-year return side by side, because the long view is the one that counts. YTD leaders, the leveraged corner, and the month's best and worst.
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LVWC charges 0.60%, but that figure sits after the leveraged index has already paid for borrowing. We trace every layer and use Amundi's older 2x USA fund to show what can be measured today.
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Six strategies, six distinct return mechanisms. The August batch arrives July 28 with a macro regime model, a two-system momentum blend, a channel breakout, a defensive trend switch, a bond timing model, and one fixed allocation. All six cleared the catalog's median Sharpe of 0.97 at launch.
Regular contributions helped a synthetic 2x S&P 500 position across long historical windows, but they never removed sequence risk. In 5,000 block-resampled 15-year paths, the leveraged route still trailed 24.74% of the time.
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A subscriber asked us to add a tactical strategy whose rules are private. We can't implement rules we can't read, so we rebuilt the portfolio's shape from three fully published models. A lower Sharpe, a slightly deeper max drawdown, 1.7 points less CAGR.
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r/ETFs is loading SPMO as a defensive core on the strength of one friendly decade. We put its real record next to a century of momentum data. The visible part is great. The invisible part is the whole risk.
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The scariest retirement start date in modern history keeps coming up on r/Fire. We extended the numbers past the usual 2023 cutoff, then re-ran the same cohort on tactical strategies.
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A community strategy we rebuilt on real funds: 50% UPRO on top of a five-asset sleeve, gated by SPY and TIP. Every rule and every number, free, including the year the gate gets wrong.
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A question from r/LETFs: if your signals lag, what do you hold in the gap? We measured every major defensive asset inside the five fastest equity selloffs since 2011. One result surprised us, and its price tag explains why nobody holds it.
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Every retirement calculator assumes you hold a static allocation for 30 years. A r/AllocateSmartly thread asked the obvious question: what if you don't?
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Morningstar says a third of this year's ETF launches are leveraged and inverse trading tools. The DRAM mania shows why chasing a theme and running a momentum rule are opposite disciplines that look identical from outside.
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r/LETFs keeps asking for a 2x total-world fund. Four products get close, and they are much more different from each other than their names suggest. We ran all four through 18 years of data.
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Beyond Passive asked how close you can get to a futures trend program with three plain ETFs and one monthly trend rule. I rebuilt it on our engine back to 1972: the drawdown cut is real, robust to the signal choice, and honest about where the edge comes from.
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Our latest release is all momentum: five strategies that each measure trend a different way. Three we built in-house, including one we ran back to 1928 to see how a momentum-plus-trend rule survives a full century of crashes. Here is the batch, the backtests, and how they fit together.
Leveraged portfolios shine for years, then a long bear market can erase a decade of gains. Here is a simple, well-worn trend rule that sidesteps the worst of it, and the braked versions of four popular portfolios we just added.
Pull any strategy's monthly signal as JSON or CSV, have each new signal pushed to a webhook, or ask Claude or ChatGPT about your strategies and portfolios over MCP. What each does, how to switch it on, and the one detail to get right before code places your trades.
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One sleeve that carries the leverage and the exit at the same time. Plus the UCITS version EU investors asked for the moment I posted it.
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A few weeks ago we measured safe withdrawal rates across 50+ tactical strategies, and the fairest critique was that our data started in 1990. So we extended HAA's backtest to 1974, through the stagflation that nearly broke the 4% rule. The safe rate came down, and that makes it more believable.
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Seven new strategies in the catalog today, six of them leveraged. They span the named names in the r/LETFs community (RNAProf, u/Wongkok, u/Low-Initiative-1327), a published author (David Alan Carter), and two r/LETFs-classic ideas (200d-SMA TQQQ trend and RSI/SMA dip-buying) that BestFolio has stabilized into shipping form. The point of this writeup is not a sales pitch. It is the rule set, what each one does well, and what breaks it. Kelly 3sig/6sig/9sig deliberately held back: the 9sig 99.73% dot-com drawdown makes that family unsuitable for a wider release.
PRIIPs blocks EU retail from AVUV, DBC and most US-domiciled ETFs, so running a US TAA strategy in Europe means substituting UCITS funds. We map every sleeve to a verified UCITS ticker with its ISIN, grade the substitution tier by tier, and flag the ones where the European version is a different strategy.
We computed Bengen-style rolling 30-year safe withdrawal rates for 80 variants across 51 published TAA strategies. In May every single one cleared 4%. On today's cards the best unleveraged TAA strategies (BAA-G4 12.7%, VAA-G4 11.9%) sustain real withdrawal rates about 3 times the Classic 60/40's 3.8%. Why TAA defeats sequence-of-returns risk, and four honest reasons you should still anchor your retirement plan closer to 4% than to the double digits.
How to build a core-satellite portfolio from 2 static cores and 3 tactical satellites, blended 60/40. From 1992 to 2026 the blend returned 13.82% a year with a -20.5% maximum drawdown and a 0.93 Sharpe: a shallower drawdown than any of the 5 strategies held alone, and a Sharpe above the best of them. Includes a simpler single-ETF core with RSST.
Once a month we ship a small batch of new strategies. May is diversification month. Five strategies, four classic ways a portfolio can fall apart, one BestFolio Original. Here is what we released, how each performs over 30 to 40 years, and how they complement each other in a blended portfolio.
What if you ran five tactical strategies side by side and let the data decide every month which deserve more weight? Two real walk-forward portfolios, 26 to 30 years out-of-sample. Conservative sleeve: 9.2% CAGR with -9.7% max drawdown. Aggressive sleeve: 17.1% CAGR over 30 years.
2022 was the cleanest A/B test the tactical asset allocation community is ever going to get. Classic dual momentum strategies (GEM, ADM, CDM) lost between 10 and 24 percent. Three Keller canary-family strategies (BAA-G4, BAA-G12, HAA) closed the year with positive returns. Same tactical framework, completely different design choices, and a lesson about which defensive asset actually defends when the "safe haven" bond is the thing falling.
Portfolio Visualizer is the most-cited free portfolio research tool, and for good reason. But research and implementation are different problems. Here is an honest, side-by-side look at where Portfolio Visualizer excels, where BestFolio is built differently, and how to decide which tool fits your workflow.
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What is 9Sig and does it work? We ran Jason Kelly's rules on observed TQQQ and AGG since 2010 (39.4% CAGR) and on a pre-inception 3x QQQ simulation through the dot-com crash (99.7% drawdown). Full numbers, 2,000 bootstrap scenarios, and why it sits in our rejection log.
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Classic diversification has felt like a tax for a decade — because funding it by selling equities in a bull run is the wrong question. A new Quantica Capital paper (March 2026) reframes it as a stacking problem, and spells out exactly why we built SmartStack™: layer gold and managed futures on top of any TAA strategy without selling what is working, using leveraged ETFs at fractional weight. No margin, no futures account.
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Most investors have no idea what factor bets they are actually making. FactorLens runs a six-factor regression with US, developed-market, and emerging-market benchmarks, then shows where the portfolio's returns come from.
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We built four new strategies from scratch — including Composite Momentum, which achieves a Sharpe ratio above 1.0 over 25+ years. Plus a community-sourced Golden Ratio portfolio. Here is how we designed them.
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European TAA broker fees checked September 15, 2026: commissions, FX minimums, instrument availability and the cost of a monthly rebalance.
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Tactical strategies involve more trades than buy-and-hold. Between commissions, spreads, subscription tools, and whole-share constraints, what is the smallest portfolio where TAA still makes sense? We run the numbers.
SPMO, MTUM, FDMO, QMOM and FMTM rotate among stocks but never leave equities. Tactical momentum strategies can move to bonds or cash. Live fund records next to long backtests, and why the windows differ.
What is the Golden Butterfly portfolio? 20% each in US total stock market, small cap value, long-term Treasuries, short-term Treasuries and gold, with the ETFs to hold it. How it differs from Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio, its backtest, pros and cons.
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The Permanent Portfolio divides your money equally among stocks, long-term bonds, gold, and cash: four assets designed to thrive in different economic environments. Created by Harry Browne in the 1980s, this fixed allocation strategy has delivered steady 7.6% annual returns with remarkably low drawdowns, making it a favorite among conservative investors seeking simplicity and resilience.
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How Gary Antonacci's Global Equities Momentum works: 3 ETFs and one monthly decision between US stocks, international stocks and bonds. The rules, the live backtest since 1985, where it fails, and a same-dates comparison with ADM and CDM.
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Three of the most popular fixed-allocation portfolios compared head-to-head. We break down historical performance, drawdowns, and who each portfolio is actually best for.
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BestFolio's own AllocateSmartly review: coverage, walk-forward evidence, UCITS support and price ($49/mo vs BestFolio $29/mo), and what each one does better.
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How tactical allocation changes portfolio weights, how it differs from a fixed 60/40, how its rules respond to a crisis, and how to build a first portfolio: 2 to 4 strategies, the weights, the ETFs and a monthly routine you can keep.
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