I'm wondering if the creator actually used CLOSE to LOW for the -20% drop, since there were have been no moves from 2/11/2010 to 2/10/2020 - the ten years he references.

I had some more thoughts on this.

Regardless of the details, since you get back into TQQQ/TMF at or slightly above the price where you got out, all you are really doing is sitting out the round-trip to the bottom. IEF is just a place to park your money, it doesn't gain much.

The 50% TMF cuts the volatility in half compared to TQQQ. But it cuts the long-term return by almost 90%. I don't consider that a good trade-off.

If you are going to stomach the volatility of a large allocation to TQQQ, why not just bite the bullet and just buy TQQQ? Going 50/50 with TMF does no good, just makes a great hand-waving argument.

Yeah, there is the issue that TQQQ has only been during a long-running bull market. Maybe handle that by doing some sort of timing, maybe the 90-day-no-new-high of QQQ.

In the QQQ backtest, QQQ investment was a high on 1/3/2022 at $91,000. Quick drop to $74,000 on 3/11/2022.
Now, 2/24/2025 it is $143,000.

Leveraged investment on a gain like that could be attractive. If you can stand it.



As you can see, this only adds a 2010 and a 2015 signal prior to the ten year mark of TQQQ.

I have found that a lot of papers & articles claim much better results that I can duplicate with my own backtest.
There's even aname for this: "replication crisis"