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Research notes

The thinking behind the discipline.

Longer pieces on philosophy and evidence, how we think about benchmarks, risk, and what an absolute-return strategy is really trying to do. These are the ideas underneath the weekly signal.

Research Note July 2026 Draft

Surviving the Dot-Com Bust: Revisited

What the 200-day rule did with technology from 2000 to 2003. Over the full 27 years since 1998 the rule and the sector held straight through earned about the same, roughly 10% a year, but the rule cut the worst peak-to-trough fall from −82% to the mid-40s. Through the dot-com bust itself it lost 20% against 72% for the sector itself, six false re-entries and T-bill interest included.
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Research Note July 2026 Draft

You Have Done Well in Technology. Now What?

Technology compounded at about 23.9 percent a year for a decade, and it is now 38 percent of the S&P 500, more than four times its equal-weight share. What the two rules do about that: a full seat and no more, plus the 200-day rule, which on the tech fund alone matched the sector's own yearly growth since 1998 while cutting the worst fall from −82% to −44%.
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Research Note July 2026 New

The Great Depression, Sector by Sector

Sector funds did not exist in 1929, but the data does. This note runs the real two-layer framework through the 1930s using Kenneth French’s daily industry records: eleven sectors, eleven separate 200-day rules. The result was over a third of the market’s pain, and back above the 1929 starting line by May 1933.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Under the Hood

For those who are advanced and technically interested in the computational decisions behind our strategy, a guide for those who want to run their own numbers. Twelve computational decisions, from the two price series to the ±1% band, stub-day returns, and why nothing here was data-mined.
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White Paper July 2026 New

How Not to Ruin a Retirement

Every retiree’s nightmare is retiring straight into a storm. What happens when the checks have to keep coming and the market falls apart? We retired an imaginary subscriber in October 2007 with $200,000 and a monthly draw that never pauses. The rule moved to cash through the worst of it, bought back in for the recovery, and a decade of rising withdrawals later the account was bigger than it started. That is what the discipline is for.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Why Investors Chase Trends, Fear Losses, and Make the Same Mistakes

Loss aversion, recency, herding, and the cycle where investors buy late, sell late, and re-enter late and why a rule's real product is fewer emotional decisions when they cost the most.
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Research Note July 2026 New

The Strategy as an Insurance Policy: An Options Lens

The 1% annual drag is the premium; the halved drawdown is the payout. What the 200-day rule has in common with protective puts, stop-losses, and barrier options and where the analogy ends.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Does One Sector Ever Own the Future Forever?

A century of Kenneth French industry data on whether leadership lasts. Yesterday's laggards beat yesterday's champions by about three points a year over the following decade, the quiet evidence behind equal weighting.
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Research Note July 2026 New

The Overreaction Beneath Mean Reversion

Why do beaten-down sectors come back? Richard Thaler, the protégé of Kahneman and Tversky, found the market overreacts: prior “losers” beat prior “winners” by roughly 25 points over the next three years. The behavioral engine underneath the century of sector rotation, plus the fair risk-based objection.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Equal Weight Versus Cap Weight, the Long View

A hundred years, the same forty nine industries, one difference: the weighting. A dollar in 1926 grew to roughly $38,000 equal weighted versus $20,000 cap weighted and the catch about the stretch we're living through right now.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Total Returns Since Inception, vs. SPY and a 60/40

Fresh computation through July 6, 2026: the strategy trails SPY and VBIAX on return, with a max drawdown near −21% versus −55% for the S&P 500. What that trade-off buys, and how the numbers were double-checked.
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Research Note July 2026 New

Five-Year Slices: What Drove the Strategy's Return

An exact decomposition of every five-year window since 1999: how much came from equal-weighting the sectors, how much from the 200-day timing signal and why the insurance only pays in the crash slices.
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Research Note July 2026 New

How We Judge Whether This Is Working

Why we run an absolute-return strategy, why the S&P 500 is the wrong yardstick for a risk-managed approach, and why a 60/40 balanced fund is the fair comparison, judged on drawdown and ending dollars, not quarterly scorekeeping.
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