SACEMS Portfolio-Asset Exclusion Testing

Are all of the potentially trending/diversifying asset class proxies used in the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) necessary? Might one or more of them actually be harmful to performance? To investigate, we each month rank the nine SACEMS assets based on past return with one excluded (nine separate test series) and reform the Top 1, equally weighted (EW) Top 2 and EW Top 3 SACEMS portfolios. We focus on gross compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and gross maximum drawdown (MaxDD) as key performance statistics, ignoring monthly portfolio reformation costs. Using end-of-month, dividend-adjusted returns for SACEMS assets during February 2006 through June 2023, we find that: (more…)