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 › Golden cross (25-day × 75-day)

1Golden cross (25-day × 75-day)

Buy when the 25-day moving average crosses above the 75-day one. The classic of technical analysis.

POINT

Result

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

After tax and costs it returned 4.2% a year. Holding the all-world index over the same period returned 14.2%, and TOPIX 11.2%.

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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.
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The numbers

Annual return (after tax & costs)4.2%
Annual return (before tax)5.1%
Difference vs. All-World (after tax)−10.0pt
Difference vs. TOPIX (after tax)−6.9pt
3-year runs that beat All-World9% (75 runs)
3-year runs that beat TOPIX20% (75 runs)
Maximum drawdown−35.2%
Winning trades12% (93 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 1.8% to 9.5% (median 4.7%). 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