These SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) signals traded as directed would have performed around 7.9 times better than short-hold with an ROI of 86% for the period 17-Aug-16 to 20-Sep-18
The SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) signals shown above were selected for their reward/risk and parameter sensitivity characteristics. Backtests don't always generate reliable signals which can be counted on moving forward but many traders find value in knowing what buy and sell signals would have worked well in the past.
Returns for the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) signals
For the 528 day (2.1 year) period from Aug 17 2016 to Sep 20 2018, these signals for SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) traded both long and short would have yielded $8,617 in profits from a $10,000 initial investment, an annualized return of 34.6%. Traded long only (no short selling) the signals would have returned $3,130, an annualized return of 13.9%. 41.5% of time was spent holding stock long. The return would have been $1,084 (an annualized return of 5.3%) if you had shorted the stock for the same period.
Signals and Trades
Not all signals are acted upon and signals are often reinforced in this type of strategy. If you are long in the security, buy signals are not acted on, for example. Similarly if you are short you must ignore sell signals. There were 35 buy signals and 47 sell signals for this particular GLD strategy. These led to 14 round trip long trades of which 8 were profitable, and 15 short trades of which 12 were profitable. Daily OHLC data is used to derive all signals and there is at most one buy and sell signal and one trade per day.
Drawdown and Reward/Risk
Drawdown (the worst case loss for an single entry and exit into the strategy) was 7% for long-short and 7% for long only. This compares to 17% for buy-hold. The reward/risk for the trading long and short was 3.01 compared to 0.25 for short-hold, a factor of 12.2 improvement. If traded long only, the reward/risk was 1.15. We use drawdown plus 5% as our risk metric, and annualized return as the reward metric.
The backtests assume a commission per trade of $7.