Market Beating Returns for Exchange Traded Funds and the Thrift Savings Plan

Why not both?

The ETF Timing System 1 provides a good example of a system that provides easy to follow ETF rotation along with a market timing exit strategy for when the markets around the world get extremely weak. It’s also a good example of a system that can outperform a buy and hold approach over multiple periods yet only requires infrequent trades. In fact, during a fairly weak period for the US markets the past few days, the signal has performed pretty well.

For the past five days, for example, the system is up about 3% while the ETF QQQQ was down about 2%. These sort of long term timing/rotation strategies are what we find the easiest to stick with when trading. The system trades infrequently, yet provides beating returns -  it has a good combination of good results and relatively low volatility (especially related to the strength of the returns), and it has a safety valve of moving to bonds when stocks are weak. This week, we added the ETF Timing System 1 Recent Performance Compared to Buy and Hold page to allow easy comparison of recent performance of the system to buy and hold.