Thesis
Momentum-code runs a deliberately simple premise: at each scheduled rebalance, buy the strongest positive movers in a 24-name large-cap universe — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, JPM, XOM and the like — with a cap per position. It is a concentrated, low-turnover, trend-following book with no cleverness beyond "own what's working, don't let any one name dominate."
Recent activity
The honest headline is that it hasn't actually traded in months. The last executed orders were a batch of buys on 31 May–1 June 2026: XOM, NVDA, BAC, HON and MSFT. Since then every scheduled run has done nothing. Across 16–23 October, six consecutive runs executed zero orders while rejecting one to three candidates each. Cash has been frozen at $608.79 the entire time, with total equity drifting between roughly $10,375 and $10,481. The most likely cause is mechanical — too little free cash to clear the per-position sizing on any candidate — but the effect is a strategy that is "live" in name and idle in practice.
Backtest and validation
On paper the record is respectable: +19.76% total return (10.6% CAGR) over 451 days, a 20.48% max drawdown, 92.74% turnover, and just $5 in total fees. Walk-forward validation is more encouraging still at first glance — all four out-of-sample folds were positive, the most recent returning 13.71% at a 1.93 Sharpe, and the probabilistic Sharpe ratio (PSR) sits at a healthy 0.811.
And yet the overall verdict is fail. The reason lives in the deflated Sharpe ratio: 0.338 once you adjust for the six variants tried. A full-sample Sharpe of only 0.65 and a thin sample of five trades leave too little statistical cushion to rule out luck. The reported 0% win rate on those five trades reinforces the small-sample problem — with so few, still-open positions, it reads as noise rather than a genuine loss signal.
Verdict
The strengths are real: a clean, explainable thesis, four-for-four positive folds, strong recent out-of-sample numbers, and negligible trading costs. So are the risks: a failed validation gate driven by a low DSR and a tiny trade count, a 20% drawdown, and — most pressingly — an operational stall that has kept idle cash out of the market for months. The edge may well exist, but on this evidence it remains unproven, and right now it isn't even being put to the test.