The Four Years My Strategy Did Nothing
It went flat for 4.6 years while the market rose 49%. Why that's harder than a crash — and why I'd still run it.
The backtest says 14.8% a year for two decades. That number is honest — I spent a week trying to break it and couldn't. But an average is a liar's best friend: nobody experiences the average. You experience the sequence. And buried inside that 14.8% is a stretch I have to show you, because it's the single hardest thing about running this strategy.
From February 2021 to March 2025 — four years and two months — my strategy returned +1.8%. Not a crash. Just… nothing. A savings account beat it.
Here's the part that makes it hard: over that exact stretch, the S&P 500 rose +49% and the Nasdaq-100 +45%. So it wasn't only flat — it spent four years losing to the index it's supposed to beat, while everyone around you got richer doing nothing. Its February-2021 high wasn't reclaimed until October 2025 — 4.6 years underwater.
The autopsy
Put the years side by side and the whole story lives in two of them:
| Year | Trenyx (B) | S&P 500 | Nasdaq-100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | +22.4% | +27.0% | +26.8% |
| 2022 | −6.6% | −19.5% | −33.1% |
| 2023 | −1.5% | +24.3% | +53.8% |
| 2024 | +6.6% | +23.3% | +24.8% |
| 2025 | +25.2% | +16.4% | +20.2% |
- 2022 — the defense worked perfectly. The market fell 20–33%. My strategy lost 6.6%. The regime filter saw the S&P break its 200-day average, moved to cash, and sat out the bear. This is the entire feature I sell.
- 2023 — the defense became the curse. The market V-recovered: +24% S&P, +54% Nasdaq. My strategy made −1.5%. It was still in cash or re-entering late, holding 2022's beaten-down leaders while the Magnificent 7 went vertical without it.
That's not a malfunction. It's physics. The exact same regime filter that pulls you to safety in a slow, 2008-style grind also keeps you out of a sharp, 2023-style snap-back. Momentum is structurally awful at V-bottoms: the trend signal lags, so you're in cash when it rips and you re-enter after the easy money is gone. And momentum always holds last year's winners straight through a change in leadership — in early 2023 that meant energy and defensives while AI quietly took off.
You don't get to keep the 2022 protection and skip the 2023 cost. They are the same mechanism. I tested it — tightening the regime filter to react faster just made things worse (it whipsawed back in during bear-market bounces). The grind isn't a bug I can patch. It's the price of the drawdown protection.
Why this is harder than a crash
A 30% crash that recovers in a year is brutal but legible — there's a villain. The market did it to you. You hold on, it comes back, you tell the war story.
Four years of going nowhere while your friends' index funds quietly compound has no villain. There's nothing to blame, nothing to point at — just a slow, daily drip of "why am I even doing this?" That feeling is the real risk in this strategy, and it's far more corrosive than any drawdown, because it whispers the most dangerous sentence in investing: maybe I should just buy the index.
And here's the cruelest part: that's exactly when people quit. My strategy bottomed in March 2025 and then returned +25% that year, immediately after. Anyone who tapped out in the dead zone — after four years of nothing, at the moment of maximum hopelessness — sold the bottom and missed the payoff. The grind doesn't just cost you returns. It hunts for the precise moment you'll capitulate.
Why I'd still run it — and why I'm telling you
Because the edge is real over a full cycle, and a full cycle includes the dead years. The 14.8% is earned by losing less in 2008 and 2022 and riding the trends in 2013 and 2025 — and the toll for that is stretches like 2021–2025, where you sit and take it. You can't have the good half without the bad half. They're the same coin.
So I'm not going to bury this in a footnote under a pretty equity curve. If you're going to put real money behind this strategy, the question that matters isn't "can you stomach a 30% drop?" Everyone says yes to that. The real question is:
Can you watch the index beat you for four years, with no crash to explain it, and not quit the week before it works?
If the answer is no, that's not a character flaw — it's just a sign this isn't your strategy, and far better to learn it now than by selling the bottom in your own March 2025. If the answer is yes, then the dead years aren't a reason to leave. They're the toll on the road, and the road still goes somewhere.
A strategy's worst moment isn't its biggest loss. It's the longest stretch where it does nothing while everything else goes up — because that's the one that gets you to quit. I'd rather show you that stretch up front than sell you an average that hides it.
Backtested results are hypothetical, exclude dividends and costs, and are not a promise of future returns. Calendar-year figures are price-return for the strategy and the named indices over the same windows. This is not investment advice.