Do Popular Stock Strategies Work? A 10-Year Test on Japanese StocksStage B: Pick by financial metrics (screening)日本語Back to chart

All strategies › Pick by metrics › Momentum (12-month winners)

14Momentum (12-month winners)

Hold the biggest gainers of the past 12 months (skipping the last month) — riding the winners.

POINT

Result

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

After tax and costs it returned −18.7% 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)−18.7%
Annual return (before tax)−18.9%
Difference vs. All-World (after tax)−32.9pt
Difference vs. TOPIX (after tax)−29.9pt
3-year runs that beat All-World0% (75 runs)
3-year runs that beat TOPIX0% (75 runs)
Maximum drawdown−88.0%
Winning trades32% (255 trades)
Median trade return−14.0%

What if the exit rule were different?

Here we re-screen and rebalance every three months. Keeping the same entry but switching among 16 exit rules gives after-tax annual returns of −19.5% to −3.3% (median −11.6%). 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