Buy-and-Hold vs Every Kaufman Strategy: The Ultimate S&P 500 Comparison

Can any technical strategy beat simply holding the S&P 500? It sounds like a lazy question — but it is actually the most important one in retail investing. Every year, thousands of traders spend enormous time and energy on indicators, crossovers, and momentum signals, convinced they can outperform the index. We ran the numbers across 13 distinct strategy configurations over 25 years [1] of real S&P 500 data to find out. The answer is humbling.

Only 2 out of 13 configurations beat buy-and-hold on CAGR. The rest underperformed — some catastrophically. Here is the full breakdown.