Claim
A switching system that holds the stronger of gold vs the S&P 500 on trailing relative strength, parking in money markets when neither beats the 3-month T-bill, achieved (1977–2026): CAGR 12.7% vs SPX 9.0% and gold 7.5%; max drawdown 31% vs SPX 53% and gold 62%.
- Source: returnstream vendor backtest, presented in gold-spx-switching-strategy. Single source, undisclosed rules (in paid ebook), undisclosed data vendor, no transaction costs stated.
- Why it might be true: momentum/rotation premia are well documented; gold-equity low correlation genuinely helps drawdown math.
- Why to be skeptical: undisclosed parameters + vendor incentive = overfitting risk; “vastly outperforms” over a window that includes gold’s 2001–11 and 2024–26 runs.
- Test: gold-spx-switching-replication — reconstruct plausible rule variants and see if the CAGR/DD profile is robust, parameter-sensitive, or unreachable.