The Test Bench › scanner

Does 6-Month Price Momentum (top 50) actually work?

DEAD

No edge left once tested on a fair footing.

The claim

Recent winners keep winning — Momentum tradition

What we did

Tested against Equal-weight survivorship-free peer universe + SPY, net of cost, 2003–2026, OOS ≥ 2021.

The result

Result: -0.6 net-αSPY %/yr (beats index net of cost)

vPEERS −0.6 (IS +1.2 → OOS −2.1, regime-flipped)

Verdict

Worked in-sample, decayed out-of-sample. Naked price momentum has been arbitraged thin.

What the test did and did not do

Almost nobody publishing a backtest says which of these they did. We list the ones we failed as well as the ones we passed.

Tested 2026-06-23. The same treatment, applied to every other system, is on the test bench.