This strategy has delivered 18% annual returns since 1926.
No black box. No complex ML model.
Just breakouts, trailing stops, and volatility sizing applied to industry portfolios.
Here's how it works (and link to the 37 page PDF):
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🔹 THE ENTRIES
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A long position triggers when an industry breaks above either:
• A Donchian Channel (20-day high, 40-day lower band)
• A Keltner Channel (20-day EMA ± 1.4× ATR, 40-day lower band)
The asymmetric lookback keeps you invested during sustained trends.
No short positions. When nothing is trending, capital sits in T-bills.
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🔹 THE EXITS
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Trailing stop = the higher of the 40-day Donchian or Keltner lower band.
Once it moves up, it never moves back down.
Winners run. Losers get cut fast.
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🔹 THE SIZING
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Volatility-targeted. Each position is sized inversely to its 14-day volatility.
More volatile industry = smaller position.
Total exposure capped at 200%.
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🔹 THE RESULTS (1926–2024)
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• 18.2% annualized return vs. 9.7% for passive equities
• Sharpe ratio of 1.39 vs. 0.63 for the market
• Max drawdown of 33% vs. 84% for equities
• Upside beta of 1.16, downside beta of 0.31
yfinance pulls live and historical price data for any ticker in seconds. Plotly turns it into interactive charts. Add your own indicators, overlays, and alerts. No subscription needed.
yfinance exposes full income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements directly. Pull any company's financials into a DataFrame, calculate your own ratios, and build custom models — all in a notebook.
Then wonder why their backtests fail in live trading.
You don't need a math degree. But you need the right foundations.
Here's the complete math & stats roadmap for trading:
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🔹 STATISTICS & PROBABILITY
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• Sample Size & Law of Large Numbers — a 10-trade backtest proves nothing. You need hundreds before trusting your edge.
• Expected Value — the only number that actually matters: (Win% × Avg Win) - (Loss% × Avg Loss)
• Standard Deviation — becomes volatility when applied to returns. Every position sizing formula runs through this.
• Correlation — 3 momentum strategies on correlated assets isn't diversification. It's 3x the risk.
• Conditional Probability — your strategy's win rate changes by market regime. Know when it works.
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🔹 LINEAR ALGEBRA
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• Vectors & Matrices — your portfolio is a weighted sum of vectors. Risk is matrix multiplication.
• PCA — turns 50 correlated indicators into 5 independent signals. Less noise, more edge.
Top 10 Algorithmic Trading Strategies (and how they work) 🧵
1. Pairs Trading
Trades two correlated instruments simultaneously. It goes long on one asset and short on the other to profit from deviations from their historical relationship, expecting the correlation to eventually resume.
2. Scalping
Involves making numerous small trades to capture minimal price differences over a short time. For example, tape reading is used to analyze order flow and timing, enabling scalpers to profit from very brief price fluctuations.