SACEVS and SACEMS Strategy Momentum?

A subscriber suggested that the Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) and the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) may each exhibit return momentum at the strategy level, such that an investor holding both as in Combined Value-Momentum Strategy (SACEVS-SACEMS) may want to tilt each month toward the one with stronger recent returns. To investigate, we test a SACEVS Best Value-SACEMS Equal-Weighted (EW) Top 2 combination strategy that each month assigns 60% weight to the strategy with the higher return over a specified lookback interval and 40% to the one with the lower return (60-40). We consider lookback intervals of 1 to 12 months. We also look at a “full tilt” version for a selected lookback interval. We use standalone SACEVS Best Value, standalone SACEMS EW Top 2 and monthly rebalanced 50% SACEVS Best Value-50% SACEMS EW Top 2 (50-50) as benchmarks. We look at average gross monthly return, standard deviation of monthly returns, monthly gross reward/risk (average monthly return divided by standard deviation), gross compound annual growth rate (CAGR), maximum drawdown (MaxDD) and gross annual Sharpe ratio as key performance metrics. In Sharpe ratio calculations, we employ the average monthly yield on 3-month U.S. Treasury bills during a year as the risk-free rate for that year. Using SACEVS Best Value and SACEMS EW Top 2 gross monthly returns during July 2006 (limited by SACEMS) through January 2024, we find that:

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