FAQ
Straight answers on getting started and on the rules behind the signal.
Subscribing takes a minute, and every subscriber gets the same full report. Once you’ve decided how much of your portfolio to give the system, you split it equally across the 11 sectors and follow the Pos line on each card in the Sector Monitor. The full step-by-step, with the quick-start guide and a worked walk-through, lives on the Getting Invested page.
STR is a rules-based trend report. It follows the 11 major S&P 500 sectors and reports when each is worth owning and when it is safer in cash. The typical investment newsletter sells stock tips, predictions, or a funnel toward something more expensive; we publish a rule and follow it.
Rebalancing belongs in this strategy, and the particular way you go about it hardly matters. We ran a dozen methods over the same 27 years and the same 6,757 trading days, from daily rebalancing to never rebalancing at all, and every one of them landed within a whisker of the others on compound annual return. Once a year, look at your holdings and even them back up. That is enough.
Some, but less than you might think, and the number depends on which stretch you look at. Through 2009 to 2019 the strategy returned about 7.2% a year against a 60/40 balanced fund’s 9.5%; through the slice that includes 2008 it won outright. The strategy works like insurance, so you pay the premium in most rising years and collect on it in the rare years the market falls hard.
The signal doesn't flip the moment a sector's price crosses its 200-day moving average, it has to clear that line by more than 1% in either direction before the position changes. Inside that band, whatever position was already in place simply holds. A sector sitting exactly on its average is the noisiest place on the chart; without a band, it would flip in and out of cash on essentially random day-to-day wiggles, racking up extra trades that don't reflect any real change in trend. The 1% band, like the 200-day window itself, was chosen for that reason before any backtest was run on this data, not picked afterward because it happened to test well.