To The Moon

Why I Don’t Care About Buy and Hold

When I build a strategy or an indicator, I am not trying to beat buy and hold.

It does not even show up on my screen.

Most people treat buy and hold as the gold standard. I don’t. Here is why.

The Buy and Hold Number Is Not Real Life

Take the S&P 500 $S&P 500(.SPX)$ through $SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust(SPY)$ the ETF.

SPY launched in 1993. If you bought it then and held it until today, about 33 years later, you would be up around 1,600%.

Nice number. But look at what it assumes.

For three decades:

• You never sold a single share.

• You never took a dollar off the table.

• You never used the money for a house, school, a medical bill, a vacation, anything.

You just sat there and watched it grow on a screen.

That is the first reason I do not care about buy and hold returns. They are based on behavior almost no real human follows.

If you are the one person who will buy the index in your 20s, never touch it, and die with it, then yes, buy and hold will usually beat the strategies I use and the ones I build.

I just do not live that way. And I do not think 99% of people do either.

I Want To Sleep At Night And Make Money

My goal is simple: sleep well and make money.

I am not chasing a theoretical maximum number. I am chasing returns I can actually stick with.

On the weekly chart, using our Combined Signal System, the S&P 500 alone would have returned about 525%.

Less than the 1,600% buy and hold number on SPY. I am fine with that, because:

• I am not only trading the S&P.

• I am running this across hundreds of stocks.

• When I am not in one name, I am rotated into another.

The target is a much higher total return from rotation, not from one ticker.

But the real point is not the exact percentage. It is the psychology.

2022: When Everyone Else Was Bleeding

Look at 2022.

The system sold near the top. Then the S&P 500 dropped almost 22% and kicked off a multi‑year bear market.

Index investors watched 20% to 30% of their net worth vanish on paper.

We were out.

And that is just the index. Big, “safe” names got crushed:

• $Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ dropped about 75%.

• $Netflix(NFLX)$ dropped about 70%.

Those are not tiny biotech stocks. Those are giants.

Our system had us out of Netflix near the top and not back in until October 2022.

That is the whole point: I give up a piece of the upside to avoid massive drawdowns that wreck people emotionally.

I Give Up The Bottom To Dodge The Worst

The indicator is not perfect. Sometimes it sells and the market immediately rips higher.

That is the cost of doing business.

But big, ugly bear markets tend to only show up when two things line up:

• Monthly BX is red

• Combined Signal System is bearish

Dark red does not guarantee a crash. It just says: if a crash is going to happen, it usually starts from here.

Example: COVID in 2020.

• The system would have exited.

• The market then fell about 30%.

• We did not nail the bottom.

In hindsight, you always wish you bought the exact low. In real time, I would rather:

• Sit out for 110 days

• Let the system re‑fire

• Then ride the multi‑year bull run that followed

While most people were panicking, we would be flat and calm.

2008: The Real Horror Story

Now rewind to 2008.

• The S&P 500 fell ~55% over two years.

• Many individual stocks fell 90% or more.

A buy and hold investor who bought the 2007 high:

• Lost about half their money over two years

• Then waited roughly 2,000 days, six to seven years, just to get back to even

Imagine being “invested” for seven years and your reward is… break‑even.

Our system would have had us mostly sidestepping that entire mess. That is what I care about.

What Actually Matters To Me

This is why I do not obsess over beating buy and hold.

• I care more about the potency of the market I am trading and the quality of the setups.

• I care that I can sleep at night and still compound over time.

• I care that I can follow the rules for decades without burning out.

I will happily give up some theoretical return over 20 to 30 years if it means:

• I avoid catastrophic drawdowns

• I stay sane

• I stay in the game

Because a strategy only works if you can stick to it when it feels awful.

No system, including mine, is a guarantee. There will be whipsaws. There will be drawdowns. There will be times it sells and the market rips.

The point is not perfection. The point is survival with discipline.

Stay in the game long enough, with rules you can actually follow, and the math has a chance to work in your favor. Want the full bull‑cycle system behind these charts?

I walk through it step‑by‑step in a free masterclass and include the 33 Fair Value Bands + Monthly BX indicators.

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