A Member Tested Buying the Whole List. 25 Years of Data Says Don't.

Four weeks of incredible results. 41,000 trades of reality. The trigger price is where the money lives.

Jan from Denmark had a killer idea. What if you skip the trigger price entirely and just buy every name on the Sunday list at the open?

He ran the numbers over four weeks. 8.4% versus 4.9% from the system. 4.1% versus 1.7% from the system. Every single week, buying the full list crushed waiting for the pullback entry. His data was clean. His methodology was solid. I was impressed.

Then I ran it across 25 years.

41,000 trades. Every regime since 2000. Dot-com bust. Financial crisis. COVID crash. 2024. The “buy the list” approach lost 9% annualized with a 94% max drawdown. Turned $100,000 into $8,000. The actual swing system, the one that waits for trigger prices, runs a 43% win rate with a 17.30% max drawdown.

In 2008, the real system made 3%. The lazy version lost 56%. Same pattern in 2020. Same pattern in every stress period.

Here’s what happened. Those four weeks Jan picked landed in the top 6% of all weeks historically. The market was straight up. Everything worked. A triple-leveraged index fund would have crushed both approaches during that window. But you can’t predict when those windows open. That’s the whole point.

The trigger price is where the alpha lives. Not in the stock selection. The list is the list. Both versions trade the same names. The difference is patience. Waiting for the right price on the right stock instead of buying any pullback at any level. Charlie Munger said the money is made in the sitting. This is the 41,000-trade proof.

This is also why a 6-month track record or a “I looked at some charts” backtest means nothing. Four weeks of real data, honestly collected, pointed in the exact wrong direction. You need 25 years. You need dot-com. You need 2008. You need every regime that broke overconfident systems, because one of those regimes is coming again and you need to know your system survives it.

The free 25-Year Backtest PDF HERE walks through exactly this kind of stress testing. This episode is the framework on pages 2-3 applied to a real member question. Reads in 15 minutes.

For the actual trigger prices, stops, and sizing delivered every Sunday, that’s Stats Edge Pro at $149/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee. When the system goes into drawdown, you’ll hear about it directly in The Drawdown Memo.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS