Beating the market with a simple proposed portfolio and technical trading rules

Abstract

This study presents evidence that well-known technical trading rules (TTRs) applied to a proposed simple exchange-traded fund (ETF) portfolio provide better risk-adjusted performance than the ‘market’ and top-ranked balanced funds (BFs). We form a portfolio of two well-known ETFs and apply some well-known TTRs like Moving Average (MA), Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) techniques to this simple proposed portfolio from January 31, 2007 to August 31, 2021. We design two strategies: (1) Long/Money and (2) Leverage/Money. We compare the risk-adjusted performance of some well-known trading rules applied to our proposed portfolio with strategy (1), Long/Money, which is a more conservative investment strategy, to the risk-adjusted performance of 14 top-ranked BFs. The best trading rules with strategy (1) applied to our portfolio outperform all the top-ranked BFs for the entire period and over two equal sub-periods. Similarly, the best trading rules applied to our portfolio with strategy (2) outperform the ‘market’, a Buy and Hold (B&H) strategy for the entire period and over two equal sub-periods. This paper contributes to the literature examining the common assumptions of efficient markets and could have important practical implications for many fund managers. In addition, the social impact of our paper could affect thousands of retail traders who are trying to ‘beat’ the market.