Do Popular Stock Strategies Work? A 10-Year Test on Japanese StocksStage A: Buy on price patterns (technical)日本語Back to chart

All strategies › Buy on price patterns › Buy the crash, sell the rebound

7Buy the crash, sell the rebound

Buy stocks that fell 15% or more in five days, expecting a bounce.

POINT

Result

vs. All-World: Lost
vs. TOPIX: Lost

After tax and costs it returned −10.8% a year. Holding the all-world index over the same period returned 14.2%, and TOPIX 11.2%.

2550100200400 20182020202220242026
All-World indexTOPIXThis strategy
Growth of ¥1M (log scale, month-end). The strategy is after tax and costs; indexes include dividends. Values in ¥10,000.
ShareXLINEFacebook

The numbers

Annual return (after tax & costs)−10.8%
Annual return (before tax)−9.8%
Difference vs. All-World (after tax)−25.1pt
Difference vs. TOPIX (after tax)−22.0pt
3-year runs that beat All-World0% (75 runs)
3-year runs that beat TOPIX0% (75 runs)
Maximum drawdown−82.3%
Winning trades3% (327 trades)
Median trade return−8.2%
Note

Note: this exit only sells on a stop-loss, so closed trades are mostly stopped-out losers. Positions still in profit at the end are not counted, which makes the win rate look low.

What if the exit rule were different?

Here we sell at an 8% loss from the purchase price (no profit-taking). Keeping the same entry but switching among 16 exit rules gives after-tax annual returns of −25.5% to 2.9% (median −13.2%). Compare with 14.2% for the all-world index.

Picking the best of 16 after the fact tends to find a lucky one, so we fixed the exit rule by strategy type in advance.

Assumptions