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Regime Change in the Markets - Trend versus CounterTrend Strategies Comparison



A lot of strategy and portfolio analysis over the weekend shows how we have been in a major regime change. Its never easy to see the regime change in real time but its always nice to quantify and clarify the regime changes and see the new opportunities in the markets. The countertrend strategies have outperformed the trend strategies by a large magnitude this year.


We analyzed 257 trading systems that we track. In our Portfolio Calculator Tool, we list each strategy and the classification of trend or counter trend that can be filtered.


When analyzing a portfolio of all 257 strategies and filtering out the trend strategies so that we can only see the countertrend strategies, we see a normal cyclical drawdown.


CounterTrend Strategies Combined Drawdown on March 15, 2024 - Normal Cycle


When analyzing a portfolio of all 257 strategies and filtering out the counter trend strategies so that we can only see the trend strategies, we see a massive separation from equity peaks. Keep in mind, there are many more variations of the same strategies for our trend strategies than our counter trend strategies.


Trend Strategies Combined Drawdown on March 15, 2024 - Extended Drawdown


Since we have been developing more countertrend, mean reversion and chop strategies lately, this is encouraging. One of our old strategies that trades many markets, SR CounterTrend has been stable during this time period with some of the SR CounterTrend Portfolios up on the year in our backtests. Lately we have also developed V-Reversal strategies, considered some Chopper Nasdaq strategies, and have also developed some VWAP and Stochastic Divergence strategies.


Today, we released the Stochastic Divergence indicator with some automated strategies using Stochastic Divergences and VWAPs soon to be released for our Portfolio Calculator and live trading as we prepare for Q2, 2024.


We can only speculate why there is such a massive regime change. One market structure change that has occurred are the 0DTE or zero days to expiration options that started at the beginning of 2023. We were excited about the opportunity of using options to increase gains on volatility-based trading systems. This has turned into a major market making trade for institutions selling these options. This seems to also correlate with more range bound markets. The major trends still exist since they occur in very small windows at the beginning of the day or end of the day as well as pre and post market and the overnight session and at times when 0DTE options have the smallest exposure.

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