Someone sent me a reel asking if this is a real strategy: every January, buy last year's best stock in the S&P 500, hold it a year, then swap. Shout out to Ricky, @the.steady.investor.

I ran it back to 1998. Your $10,000 hit about $48,500 by the end of 1999, then fell to about $1,400 by 2011. You trailed the S&P 500 at the end of every year from 2001 to 2023. Then NVIDIA and Palantir more than doubled, and you finished 2025 at about $252,000 against $117,000 for the index, in US dollars. Change whose list of winners you use and the same idea ends anywhere from about $84,000 to $810,000.

Whole countries went the other way. Over 50 years of developed markets, buying last year's best country turned $10,000 into about $1.5 million. Owning them all in equal shares got about $2.3 million, and last year's worst got about $91,000.

Old data can fit almost any story. One researcher showed butter production in Bangladesh explained about 75% of the S&P 500's swings. Please don't buy sheep. Momentum is real in the research, which buys hundreds of recent winners at once, and published edges shrink by about 58% once everyone knows. About 4% of US stocks created all the market's gains over treasury bills from 1926 to 2016, and 98.8% of Canadian equity funds trailed the TSX over the 10 years to 2025.

3 things I'd keep
1. Own the whole world as your base, with low-cost market index funds.
2. Tilting toward momentum, value or profitability? Have a reason that holds up once everyone knows it, and be ready for it to trail for 10 years.
3. Where you rotate matters. In a regular account, half of every gain you sell is taxed. In a TFSA or RRSP the switch isn't taxed.

More at calmmoneycoach.com, and my email list is free.

I'm Brian Orlando, CPA, in Halifax. Advice-only planning through Calm Money Coach. No products, no commissions.

Before fees, trading costs and taxes. My backtest of yearly S&P 500 winners, Ken French country data, Leinweber, McLean and Pontiff, Bessembinder 2018 and SPIVA Canada Year-End 2025. Education only.

#investing #indexfunds #sp500 #personalfinancecanada