The thesis
Dual-momentum is a trend-following strategy with a simple, well-worn premise: hold the strongest trending names by 60-day return, and exit when the trend breaks. It runs over a 24-name large-cap universe spanning tech, financials, healthcare, staples, and energy — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, JPM, UNH, XOM and the like. The design bets that recent winners keep winning long enough to capture, and that a mechanical exit caps the damage when they don't.
Recent activity
Here the picture is quiet — perhaps too quiet. Across six scheduled runs from 2026-08-13 through 2026-08-20, the strategy executed zero trades and rejected zero orders, holding a flat $10,000 in cash each session. In live paper trading it is currently doing nothing: no names are clearing its trend filter, so it stays uninvested. That is defensible behaviour for a trend model in a rangebound tape, but it also means the live track record is, as of this writing, empty. All performance below comes from backtest and validation, not realized live results.
Backtest performance
Over 451 days the strategy returned 23.5% (final equity $12,349.63), a 12.52% CAGR, with a Sharpe of 0.95 and a max drawdown of 15.67%. Two numbers deserve a hard look. First, the win rate is just 28.79% across 136 trades — a classic trend-following signature where a few large winners pay for many small losses. Second, turnover is a punishing 2,638%, meaning the book churns many times over; fees were modest here ($136), but that churn is fragile to slippage and higher real-world costs.
Validation — and why it failed
The walk-forward validation did not pass, and that is the headline risk. Across four folds, three were positive, but fold 2 (Jan–Jul 2025) lost 7.31% with a -1.05 Sharpe and a 17.15% drawdown — the strategy's stress scenario. Out-of-sample, results were actually encouraging: 13.34% OOS return at a 2.15 OOS Sharpe. The failure comes from the overfitting-adjusted metrics: with 6 trials, the Deflated Sharpe Ratio is 0.476, below the confidence bar, even though the Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio (0.893) looks healthier. In plain terms, the edge is plausible but not statistically convincing once you account for how many variants were tried.
Verdict
Dual-momentum has a coherent thesis and a respectable headline backtest, but three cautions temper it: a failed validation gate, extreme turnover, and a live account that has yet to place a single trade. The OOS Sharpe suggests there may be a real signal worth watching; the DSR says don't size into it on faith. Treat this one as a live experiment to observe, not a conviction allocation — and revisit once it has actually deployed capital in the wild.