QuantRanks is now PatalaRank

Same model. Same universe of roughly 500 stocks. Same monthly rankings. A new name, bringing everything together under the Patala Portfolio brand.

A refreshed homepage is coming soon. More on that later.

Two months ago, my model picked a stock that sits at the intersection of light and data. It makes the lasers and optical components that move data between AI servers inside data centers, and its last quarterly revenue more than doubled from a year earlier.

I bought it on August 17. Not because of the headlines. Because the rank said to.

Since that Monday, it’s up 16.3%.

And what a week. Last week it hit a new high Tuesday, dropped 5.6% Thursday, then bounced 5.2% Friday, setting another intraday high along the way.

This month, the same name is back near the top of the list.

PatalaRank runs once a month. It doesn’t remember what it bought last cycle, and it doesn’t care that the position is already working. It scores roughly 500 stocks fresh on this month’s data. This one landed near the top again.

How the picks are doing?

I’m introducing a simpler, more transparent way to track every weekly recommendation: $1,000 hypothetically invested in each stock at Monday’s opening price, compared with $1,000 in SPY at the same opening.

Nine picks so far. Every recommendation counted, including repeat buys. No cherry-picking.

9 picks so far: +19.45% vs. SPY’s +1.36%. Tickers are free for subscribers below.

Subscribe for free to see this week’s pick: the name, the numbers, and why the rank found it twice.

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Market digest: what moved this week

• Treasury yields pushed to fresh 24-year highs again this week, and crude climbed alongside them for several sessions — WTI touched near $92 a barrel, Brent above $104 — before easing back off those highs by Friday.

• Stocks rallied hard into the weekend as the bond and oil pressure that had weighed on the week eased into the close. The Dow jumped 423 points (+0.83%) Friday to close at 51,654.95, the S&P 500 added 0.59% to 7,811.54, and the Nasdaq rose 0.64% to 27,366.17. Tech and healthcare led the bounce — Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike all gained 4-5%, Merck and Gilead each added more than 2%.

• Telecom stocks lagged after SpaceX agreed to acquire a nationwide spectrum portfolio, stoking competitive worries at AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

• Bitcoin had the roughest week of the three by far. It fell as low as $80,365 on Thursday — down about 7.2% from Tuesday’s roughly $86,600 — as rising yields and a firmer dollar pulled money toward bonds, leveraged long positions got liquidated, and ETF outflows added to the pressure. On-chain data showed unrealized profit margins had hit their highest level since December 2024, and holders took the most profit of any week so far in 2026.

Net effect: SPY up 1.16% on the week. GLD up 1.17%. BTC down 2.36%, clawing back part of Thursday’s sharp selloff by Friday’s close.

But where do the trade signals stand for the 3 major assets?

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QQQ is at record highs, the trend remains strong, and I’m not trying to call a market top. In fact, my historical data suggests that new highs during a BUY signal have tended to stay bullish.

But there’s a difference between staying invested and carrying more leverage than I need.

At the same time, this rally is unusually narrow. When QQQ made its first new high in sixteen weeks on September 22, fewer than half of Nasdaq-100 stocks were trading above their 50-day moving averages—by one measure, the weakest participation on any record day since 2016. Across the S&P 500, only about 49% of stocks were above their 200-day averages, down from roughly 70% at the end of July.

That doesn’t mean a correction is imminent. It does mean a handful of leaders are doing most of the lifting, and I don’t think this is the time to carry maximum leverage.

So I’m making one change.

Why Reduce Leverage Now?

My QQQ signal remains bullish, and momentum is still positive. That’s why I’m not exiting the uptrend.

But current conditions are less attractive for carrying nearly 2x portfolio exposure:

• Signal: BUY

• Trend: Still bullish

• QQQ: At record highs, about 13% above its 200-day moving average

• Momentum: Strong (RSI near 70)

• Market breadth: Weak—gains concentrated in a few leaders

• Portfolio exposure: ~1.86x

Historically, conditions like these have not been reliable sell signals. Markets can keep climbing while overbought and narrow.

But they can also become more vulnerable to sharp pullbacks.

That’s an important distinction.

What My Backtest Says

When I tested my QQQ signal from 2001 to today, the exposure level changed the risk dramatically:

Backtest of my QQQ timing signal at fixed exposure levels, Jan. 2001–Oct. 2026, reset daily like a leveraged ETF. Includes estimated leveraged-ETF costs: financing on exposure above 1x plus a 0.9% expense ratio. Excludes commissions, taxes, and interest on cash. Hypothetical; past results don’t guarantee future returns.

Cutting exposure from roughly 1.85x to 1.4x gives up some hypothetical return in the backtest, but it cuts the number of drawdowns deeper than 15% by more than half.

At this stage, that’s a trade-off I’m comfortable making.

Big drawdowns hurt compounding even when the underlying signal ultimately proves right.

Below is exactly what I’m doing.

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Welcome to my second monthly portfolio update. I launched this newsletter at the end of July and published my first live signal on July 26. My track record started from scratch in August, and I report it live every month.

Since I started tracking, the account is up +11.45% against +2.34% for SPY.

• August: +6.80%

• September: +4.36%, while SPY finished slightly lower

A few things worth knowing before those numbers get too much credit:

• No money was added or withdrawn. This is pure trading performance.

• It wasn’t a smooth ride. In September the account fell to roughly -3% by mid-month, then climbed past +5% before closing at +4.36%. Systematic doesn’t mean comfortable. It means staying in your seat.

A note on August’s number: My August update reported +8.14%, taken from the IBKR mobile app. This update uses IBKR’s Consolidated Return report for every period, so the months tie together. August is restated to match.

How these updates work: Every monthly update has two parts. Part 1 explains how the strategy works. It’s the same every month, so skip ahead if you’ve read it. Part 2 is the deep dive: what’s in the account, what changed, and how the picks are doing.

Part 1: The Strategy (this section runs every month, unchanged)

One signal. That’s it.

Everything in this portfolio comes down to one quant timing signal, built over twenty-plus years. It has two parts:

• A macro model that makes one BUY or SELL call on the first trading day of each month.

• A daily model that splits the market into 158 zones. Only 11 trigger a SELL, so the signal stays invested through normal ups and downs and steps aside only when things get genuinely dangerous.

The signal flips about 9-12 times a year. That’s the whole job: check it, act if it flips, sit tight the rest of the time.

Backtested, and verified independently through Portfolio Visualizer:

• SPY, since January 2000: a hypothetical $10,000 grows to $1.75 million, with a worst drawdown of just -8.5%, versus -50.8% for buying and holding.

• QQQ, same 26+ years: $10,000 grows to $9.2 million (29.28% a year) versus $90,406 for buy-and-hold (8.64%). It also sidestepped the dot-com crash’s 81% collapse, with a worst drawdown of only -9.97%.

The signal doesn’t win by picking better stocks. It owns the same index either way. It wins by not being there for the crashes.

The Core: your engine

You choose what the signal drives:

• SPY: 500 companies, broadly diversified, steadier. The conservative choice.

• QQQ: 100 growth-heavy names, more volatile, historically higher-returning. The aggressive choice.

For those who want to go further, the same signal on TQQQ (a 3x-leveraged Nasdaq-100 fund) turned a hypothetical $10,000 into $1.56 billion over a 16-year backtest (2010-2026), versus $3.2 million for buy-and-hold. Some honest caveats:

• It’s a hypothetical backtest, not real trading.

• The window starts near the bottom of a historic bull run.

• Leverage decays in choppy, sideways markets.

• This isn’t a recommendation to hold 3x leverage unhedged.

The Plus: one high-conviction stock a week

On top of the Core sits QuantRanks, the stock-picking half of the model:

• Every Sunday at 7:00 am ET, I publish the week’s top-ranked pick from 450+ stocks.

• I buy it Monday, funded by trimming a slice of the Core.

• I hold it until the signal flips to SELL, when Core and picks all go to cash together. No price targets, no separate exit rules.

Two guardrails keep the stock sleeve in check:

• Each buy is typically about 3% of the portfolio. If a name keeps reappearing in the top picks, I keep adding to it.

• The sleeve is capped at 50%, so at least half the book stays in the Core.

Why “Core-Plus”

Three layers, three jobs:

• The Signal decides when: invested or in cash.

• The Core decides what you hold: SPY, QQQ, or a leveraged version.

• The Picks decide what you add: one high-conviction stock a week.

The Patala Live Portfolio runs this exact system with my own money. I report allocations and percentages, not dollar amounts, so what transfers to you is the strategy, not my account size.

Full backtests and methodology: The Simplest Investment System in the World · $10,000 in the Nasdaq Since 2000 · Same Signal + 3x the Leverage · The Patala Core-Plus Strategy

What’s inside Part 2

Here’s the full breakdown of how my portfolio stood on September 30: every asset and its exact weight in the book, plus the scorecard for every pick. The Core is the same four ETFs as last month. The Plus sleeve now holds six QuantRanks stocks, two of them new.

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A free subscription gets you:

1. Weekly trade signals on SPY, BTC, and GLD + real-time flip alerts.

2. The stock I buy every Monday.

3. Monthly live portfolio performance & all holdings.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I’ve bought this stock twice. Both buys are in the green. The first one is up 42%.

Then, this past Wednesday, one of the biggest banks on Wall Street cut it to Sell, with a price target roughly 60% below where the stock had just closed.

Thursday evening, it was named to the Nasdaq-100.

Same stock. Same week. Two completely opposite headlines. And this stock is already up more than 500% in 2026.

My model has never heard of either one. It doesn’t read analyst notes, and it doesn’t care about index announcements. Once a month, it re-scores 450+ stocks on fresh data. That’s all it did.

📅 In August, this stock landed at #4.

📅 In September, it climbed to #2.

📅 This month, it’s not #3.

It’s #1.

I’ve never bought the same stock three times. I’m about to.

First, how the last eight have done?

I’ve bought one QuantRank every week since Aug 10. Here’s every one, no cherry-picking, marked to Friday’s close:

Seven winners, one loser. The average across all eight is +14.16%, against +0.22% for SPY over the same holding periods. Five of those tickers are still locked above, including both of my earlier buys of this week’s stock.

Subscribe free to see this week’s pick and all 8 tickers, and get my future stocks in your inbox every Sunday at 6am ET.

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Market digest: what moved this week

• The 10-year Treasury yield spiked to 5.34% this week — its highest level since 2002 — before easing back to around 5.18-5.25% by Friday. A five-week-long global bond rout and crude oil pushing near $100 a barrel were the main pressure points.

• Friday’s September jobs report came in much weaker than expected — just 29,000 jobs added, well short of a “steady” labor market. Unemployment ticked up, though broader underemployment actually improved. Weak as it was, it did the market a favor: it eased pressure on the Fed to raise rates further at the October meeting, and stocks rallied hard on the news.

• The Nasdaq hit a fresh record high Friday, powered by Nvidia and a blowout earnings report from Micron that lifted chip stocks broadly.

• Stocks were mixed on the week overall. The Dow fell about 1.3%, the S&P 500 slipped roughly 0.3%, while the Nasdaq eked out a gain — tech holding up far better than the rest of the market under the weight of higher yields.

A 24-year-high bond yield. A jobs report that missed badly. A record Nasdaq close. It was a week built for a flip — so did any of the three signals actually move? Here’s exactly where SPY, GLD, and BTC stand right now.

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(Image: Micron G8 QLC NAND, courtesy of Micron Technology, Inc.)

It would be an understatement to say that $MU’s earnings today are high stakes.

If the market receives it positively, it could help push both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq to new all-time highs.

If the reaction is negative, it could trigger a real meltdown — not in isolation, but against a backdrop of the highest 10-year Treasury yields since before the Global Financial Crisis.

Micron was the very first stock I ever published as my #1 QuantRanks pick. I said I was buying it the day before, and bought it at the open on Monday, Aug 10, at $863.67 — and again on Sept 8, at $1,036.40.

As of Tuesday’s close, I’m up 23.3% on my Aug 10 buy.

Micron reports fiscal Q4 earnings today, after the close. This is the AI trade’s other bellwether — not the GPU maker everyone already has an opinion on, but the company that makes the memory those GPUs can’t function without. Every AI server, every large model, every “longer context window” the industry keeps promising runs through a memory chip first.

MU: Positives vs. negatives heading into earnings

There’s been a real arm-wrestling match playing out in markets lately — bulls against bears, equities against rising oil prices and climbing yields. Here’s what I’m weighing, briefly, on both sides:

Positives:

• Demand is outrunning supply industry-wide — Micron’s own filings say AI-driven memory demand is growing faster than the whole industry can supply it, not just Micron’s own capacity

• Meta’s Muse is a fresh, specific catalyst — one of the stock’s most bullish analysts points to it as new evidence AI demand is broadening, not slowing

• Micron’s Cloud Memory and Core Data Center business-unit revenues surged 307% and 653% year over year, respectively

• The product roadmap extends past this quarter — a new 512GB DDR5 RDIMM for AI data centers, announced this month, won’t hit volume production until 2H 2027

• Wall Street consensus is a Moderate-to-Strong Buy across 45 analysts, with an average target well above today’s price

Negatives:

• Michael Burry has publicly increased his short position, citing stretched memory valuations

• A potential labor strike looms at Micron’s Taiwan plant

• Samsung just announced a major HBM4 capacity expansion — direct competition in Micron’s strongest segment

• Short interest has been rising for months

• The stock has already shown it can drop 5%+ in a single session on nothing more than sentiment, with zero change to the underlying business

None of that — bull or bear — is a call on what Micron actually reports today, or how the stock reacts. QuantRanks isn’t scoring analyst price targets, product launches, short interest, or competitive threats directly. It’s scoring the stock the same quant way it scores every other name in the universe.

With everything said, what’s its current rank and is it still a buy? Both answers right below

The stocks I’ve bought — and how they’ve done

Before I answer both questions on Micron, here’s the performance of every single stock I published and bought since Aug 10 based on the same QuantRanks ranking system — no cherry-picking, marked to Tuesday’s close:

Five winners, three losers, an average return across all eight that’s meaningfully ahead of just holding the index over the same stretch. Five of those tickers are hidden above.

Subscribe for free to see MU’s current QuantRank, the verdict, and every ticker in the track record above.

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Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash

Before this week’s pick — how have the last seven done?

I’ve been publishing one QuantRank every week since early August. Here’s every single one, no cherry-picking, marked to Friday’s close:

Five winners, two losers, an average return across all seven that’s meaningfully ahead of just holding the index over the same stretch. I’m not naming the tickers here — free subscribers get the full history with names below, and each one has its own article if you want the reasoning behind it.

Now to the stock I’m Buying Monday, Sept 28

Most people know this company as the one that sells laptops to their office IT department. That’s not wrong, but it’s increasingly not the point.

A quarter that used to be about PC margins and enterprise storage renewals just produced numbers that would have seemed almost unimaginable for this company a few years ago: revenue up 58% year over year, GAAP earnings per share up 273%, and a $95 billion AI-server backlog — larger than the $88.4 billion in total revenue the entire company generated in fiscal 2024, just two years ago.

My model doesn’t read earnings calls. It doesn’t know what “AI server backlog” means, and it has no opinion on analyst price targets. It just ranks all 450+ stocks the same quantitative way, every week — and this week, this one landed at #4.

Subscribe for free to see this week’s pick — the name, the numbers, and the full track record with tickers attached.

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Market digest: what moved this week

• Treasury yields spiked midweek, and the move rippled through both stocks and bonds. Wall Street couldn’t fully agree on why — stubborn inflation, faster growth, or deficit concerns all got blamed — but the higher-for-longer repricing unsettled markets for a few sessions.

• The Nasdaq hit a fresh record close on Tuesday (27,244.28, its first record close since June), driven by a rally in AI-linked stocks, before easing back to 27,068.72 by Friday as the yield spike caught up with tech.

• Consumer sentiment fell to a multi-month low. The University of Michigan’s index dropped to 48.1 in September from 51.7 in August, with higher grocery and gas prices weighing on households’ outlook.

• Oil prices swung, then eased. Crude gave back its midweek gains by Friday on supply-side optimism, which took some pressure off the inflation narrative into the close.

• Stocks rallied into the weekend. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each notched a weekly gain, and the Dow snapped a three-week losing streak with a strong Friday session.

• All three Patala signals held steady — no flips this week.

Net effect: SPY up 1.27% on the week. GLD down 1.93%. BTC up 3.95%, its highest level since January.

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Where all three signals stand

All three signals, side by side:

Same 8 weeks, indexed to the same starting point — Bitcoin’s climb this week pulled it further ahead of the other two.

The honest part on gold: the BUY that opened September 17 is down 1.24% eight days in. It’s a small, early loss on a position that’s barely had time to prove anything either way — worth noting, not worth reading into.

The honest part on Bitcoin: a bond-yield spike that rattled most of the market this week barely touched Bitcoin’s BUY, which is now up 5.55% and sitting at its best level since January. Markets that “should” have been risk-off by the mid-week playbook didn’t behave that way in this position.

Why a volatile week produced zero flips

A bond-market scare, a weak consumer sentiment print, and a swing in oil prices all hit in the same week, and none of it moved any of the three signals. That’s not the system ignoring real news — it’s the system doing exactly what it’s built to do, which is read price and nothing else. Some weeks that produces a flip. This week it produced three signals staying exactly where they were. Next scheduled update: Saturday, October 3, 6:00 AM ET.

As always: this is not investment advice, and I’m not telling you what to do with your money. What I can tell you is what the discipline of the system calls for — follow the signal, don’t front-run the next update, and don’t let a volatile week in bonds or oil pull you outside the plan.

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Full transparency: every recent flip

Why “no flips” is still worth reporting

A week with zero flips across all three signals isn’t a week with nothing to say — it’s a week where a real macro shock (the bond-yield spike) tested every position at once and none of them moved. That’s a more meaningful data point than it looks like at first glance: it means none of the three assets crossed a line that mattered, even during a stretch that rattled plenty of other things. The system doesn’t get credit for “doing nothing” the way it gets credit for a well-timed flip, but the discipline is identical either way.

A quick favor. If this issue was useful, please subscribe and share it with a friend who’d benefit from 20+ years of original systematic research. It genuinely helps. Thank you for reading.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice or a recommendation, and I am not a registered investment adviser. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. The signals reflect backtested and now live-tracked quantitative models; past performance, backtested or live, does not guarantee future results. Cryptocurrency is especially volatile and involves risks distinct from traditional securities. Markets involve risk, including loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

Update: This is my founding post, first published July 21, 2026 with a backtest through July 2026. I’ve extended the Portfolio Visualizer backtest through the end of August 2026 and refreshed every chart and number below. Nothing about the system changed — only the data got longer.

I am an engineer. Not a banker, not a finance-school graduate — an engineer who spent more than twenty years obsessed with a single question about the stock market.

Engineers are trained to find the signal inside the noise. Hand us a chaotic system and we will take it apart, measure it, and ask the same stubborn question for years: what actually drives this?

For me, that system was the market. And the question that wouldn’t let go was simple: is there a reliable way to know when to be invested and when to step aside?

Not stock-picking. Not predicting the future. Just that one binary decision, made well, repeatedly, for decades. Because if you get it right, you avoid the catastrophic losses that quietly destroy most people’s wealth — the 50% drawdowns that take years to climb out of.

More than twenty years of quantitative research and 26+ years of backtesting later, I had my answer.

And I’ve come to believe it may be the simplest effective investment system in the world.

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This isn’t just a backtest

The signal is live and public. I’ve posted every SPY signal as it happens since July 26, 2026, and since August 10 I’ve also published a weekly stock pick from QuantRanks, my monthly stock-scoring model. After each month closes, I post my full portfolio and its performance, wins and losses both.

My first monthly report, for August 2026, showed my full portfolio up 8.14%, against 2.68% for SPY. One month proves nothing on its own, but it’s on the record, and every month after it will be too. Read the full August portfolio update →

The backtest below shows how the system behaved across 26+ years. The live record shows what it’s doing now.

Let me show you what it did. The figures below were calculated by Portfolio Visualizer, with every SELL period modeled as held in cash.

What changed with the August update

Short version: the extra month strengthened every number, and the risk profile didn’t move.

• Ending balance: $1,752,776 → $1,808,805

• CAGR: 21.45% → 21.52%

• Sharpe ratio: 1.77 → 1.78

• Sortino ratio: 5.65 → 5.67

• Maximum drawdown: unchanged at −8.48%

• Worst calendar year: unchanged at +6.22%

$10,000, two paths, 26+ years

Here is the same $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 from January 2000 to August 2026 — more than a quarter century. One line simply buys and holds SPY. The other follows my market timing signal: in the market when it says BUY, in cash when it says SELL.

Even after adjusting for inflation, the system ends at $908,776 in today’s dollars. Buy and hold ends at $41,906.

But the returns aren’t even the best part

Here’s what took me years to fully appreciate: the power of this system isn’t in the gains. It’s in the losses it avoids.

Look at that chart. Across 26+ years — when the dot-com crash took the S&P 500 down 44%, and the 2008 crisis took it down 50% — the timing system was sitting in cash. Its worst drawdown over the entire period was just 8.5%.

The stress-period numbers from the report tell the whole story:

• Dot-com crash (2000–2002): system −3.7% vs buy & hold −44.7%

• Subprime crisis (2007–2009): system −8.5% vs buy & hold −50.8%

• COVID-19 crash (2020): system −0.04% vs buy & hold −19.4%

Every risk measure, side by side — 26+ years

Let me give you the full dashboard rather than a cherry-picked stat. This comes directly from the Portfolio Visualizer report, covering January 2000 through August 2026:

Every blue bar sits above zero. Every one of the black bars that drops below it — 2000, 2001, 2002, 2008, 2018, 2022 — is a year the system stayed positive.

And notice the risk-adjusted ratios. A Sharpe of 1.78 versus 0.47. A Sortino of 5.67 versus 0.69. Over more than two decades the system produced far more return for every unit of risk — with lower volatility (10.20% vs 15.15%) and higher returns (21.52% vs 8.28% a year) at the same time. That combination is supposed to be difficult. Here it comes from a single discipline, applied consistently for 26+ years.

How it works — two layers

I built it the way an engineer builds a control system: one layer to set direction, a second, faster layer to react to the present.

Layer 1 — The macro model. On the first trading day of each month, it produces a single call: BUY or SELL. This is the strategic backbone, reading the broad market environment.

Layer 2 — The daily zones. Every day, the model divides the S&P 500 into 158 distinct zones. Only 11 of those zones trigger a SELL. Everything else means stay invested. Layer 2 catches danger that arrives mid-month.

That second number is the heart of the design. Out of 158 zones, only 11 say “get out.” The model is built to stay invested — it ignores routine dips and sideways chop, and only steps aside when price enters genuine danger. The bar to leave the market is deliberately high, and 26+ years of backtesting is what calibrated exactly where those danger zones sit.

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How you actually use it

At the end of each trading day, the system produces the signal for the next trading day. Two states, two actions:

• BUY → be 100% invested in your chosen asset.

• SELL → be 100% in cash.

How I actually apply it

The signal is the foundation. Because it reads the S&P 500 — the core of the US stock market — I use it to govern everything I hold in US stocks. How much you build on top of it is up to you.

Level 1: My personal 401(k) version (5 to 8 hours a year). This is the simplest way to run the system, and it’s how I run my own 401(k). When the signal says BUY, I hold a broad US large cap index fund. When it says SELL, I move to the plan’s stable value fund. There are no taxes on the trades, no special account, and no stock picking.

Level 2 — Core-Plus. The same signal governs a core position in QQQ — or, for the aggressive, TQQQ — plus smaller sleeves of the top-ranked stocks from QuantRanks, my monthly stock-scoring model. It offers more return potential, with more risk and more work. Read the full Core-Plus strategy →

What’s next

The QQQ backtest — the Nasdaq 100, where buy & hold fell 83% in the dot-com crash, and where a $10,000 stake grew into millions — will be extended through the end of September and published in October.

If you want a patient, systematic, hype-free approach to the market, follow along.

The simplest market timing signal in the world. One signal. One trade when it flips. Backtested across 26+ years. Five to eight hours a year to run.

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Disclaimer: I am not a registered investment adviser, and nothing here is personalized investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer of advisory services. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. Performance figures are generated by Portfolio Visualizer from historical data and a backtested application of the signal; backtested results are hypothetical, have inherent limitations, and do not guarantee future results. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

Eighteen months ago, this company didn’t exist as a standalone stock. It was spun out of a much larger parent, started trading on its own at roughly $35 a share, and looked, on paper, like a forgettable memory-chip afterthought.

It is now up more than 1,650% in a single year.

It has been at the center of one of the most dramatic hedge fund blowups — a $20 billion AI fund built a five-and-a-half-billion-dollar position in it, then got margin-called and force-liquidated the entire thing to a rival in a single block trade. The stock cut nearly in half in weeks, for reasons that had nothing to do with the business itself.

And on the exact same day I’m buying it, it’s joining the S&P 100 — the index’s blue-chip inner circle, a step up from the S&P 500 it already entered last November.

My model doesn’t know any of that. It doesn’t read hedge fund 13Fs, doesn’t track forced liquidations, doesn’t have an opinion on index inclusion. It just ranks all 450+ stocks the same quantitative way, every week — and this week, this one landed at #3.

Subscribe for free to see this week’s pick — the name, the numbers, and the wild story behind the chart.

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Market digest: what moved this week

• The Fed hiked rates for the first time since 2023. On Wednesday, the FOMC voted 12-0 to raise the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to a target range of 3.75%–4.00%. It was almost fully priced in — the CME FedWatch Tool showed >92% odds of exactly this move heading into the meeting.

• Chair Warsh struck a measured tone. He acknowledged inflation “remains elevated” but stopped short of promising more hikes, even as the Fed’s own dot plot showed most officials expect at least one more before year-end.

• Stocks barely blinked. The S&P and Nasdaq nudged higher on the announcement itself, and the broader market stayed calm through the rest of the week — no dramatic repricing in either direction.

• Gold flipped back to BUY on Thursday, the day after the hike, ending a 12-day SELL.

• Bitcoin had the wildest week of the three. It dipped toward $76,000 after the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act (a crypto market-structure bill) on Tuesday, then ripped back above $81,000 by Friday after the SEC issued a new “Innovation Exemption” allowing tokenized-stock trading on approved platforms — a rare piece of clearly pro-crypto regulatory news landing the same week as the Fed hike.

Net effect: SPY down 0.34% on the week. GLD up 0.60%. BTC up 5.19%, closing near its highest level since the mid-August surge.

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Where all three signals stand

All three signals, side by side:

Same 8 weeks, indexed to the same starting point — Bitcoin’s swings dwarf the other two, even in a week it ultimately finished strong.

The honest part on gold: the SELL that opened September 4 lasted exactly 12 days and avoided a 2.07% decline. It closed out the moment the price called for it — the day after a Fed decision, not because of one.

The honest part on Bitcoin: the position that’s been open since September 4 just lived through a 6.6% round trip in a single week — down to the mid-$76,000s, then back above $81,000 — without a single flip. Staying the course through that kind of swing is exactly what “zero discretion” means in practice, not just in theory.

Why the Fed decision didn’t get a vote

A first rate hike in three years is the kind of headline that tempts a lot of people to guess what happens next and trade around it. The system didn’t do that. SPY’s 169-day BUY didn’t move because of a rate decision. Gold’s flip happened a day later, driven by price, not by the announcement itself. And Bitcoin’s volatile week played out entirely inside a position that was already open. Next scheduled update: Saturday, September 26, 6:00 AM ET.

As always: this is not investment advice, and I’m not telling you what to do with your money. What I can tell you is what the discipline of the system calls for — follow the signal, don’t front-run the next update, and don’t let a headline as big as a Fed hike pull you outside the plan.

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Full transparency: every recent flip

Why a fast reversal isn’t a red flag

Gold went SELL to BUY in under two weeks this time, and some readers will wonder if that means the system is “whipsawing.” It isn’t — it’s reading price the same way every time, and sometimes price moves fast enough that the signal does too. The alternative — waiting for a trend to “prove itself” before acting — is a discretionary judgment call, and this system doesn’t make those. Fast or slow, every flip gets published the same way.

A quick favor. If this issue was useful, please subscribe and share it with a friend who’d benefit from 20+ years of original systematic research. It genuinely helps. Thank you for reading.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice or a recommendation, and I am not a registered investment adviser. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. The signals reflect backtested and now live-tracked quantitative models; past performance, backtested or live, does not guarantee future results. Cryptocurrency is especially volatile and involves risks distinct from traditional securities. Markets involve risk, including loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Last month, my model picked a stock most people wouldn’t have guessed — a name still living down its association with a pandemic that’s mostly behind us, weeks removed from a headline-grabbing 160% single-session spike and an equally sharp round-trip lower.

I bought it anyway. Not because of the headline. Because the rank said to.

Since that Monday, the position is up 7% — and this month, the same name is back on the list, and higher up it.

QuantRanks runs once a month. It doesn’t carry a memory of what it bought the cycle before, and it doesn’t check whether last month’s picks are already working. It just scores all 450+ stocks fresh against this month’s data. This name landed near the top again anyway.

Subscribe for free to see this week’s pick — the name, the numbers, and why the rank found it twice.

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Market digest: what moved this week

• August CPI ran hotter than hoped. Headline inflation came in at 3.4% year-over-year (0.4% month-over-month), with core CPI at 2.4% year-over-year (0.3% month-over-month) — core came in a touch above expectations.

• That reinforced bets on a Fed rate hike, not a cut. The CME FedWatch Tool now shows roughly 87% odds of a 25-basis-point hike at the September 16 meeting, with the remaining probability on no change at all — a sharp shift from the cut expectations that were priced in earlier in the summer.

• A jump in oil prices added to the inflation pressure, and long-term Treasury yields pushed to some of their highest levels in nearly two decades before easing back late in the week.

• Stocks had a rough week. The S&P 500 fell for four straight sessions before bouncing back on Friday; on the week, the S&P lost about 0.6%, the Nasdaq fell about 0.7%, and the Dow shed roughly 425 points. The Dow remains about 4% below its August 5 record close — no new highs this week.

• Gold and Bitcoin both pulled back too, consistent with a week that leaned toward higher-for-longer rate expectations rather than the rate-cut optimism some had been pricing in.

• All three Patala signals held steady. No flips this week — a rare quiet stretch after last week’s double reversal.

Net effect: SPY down 0.77% on the week. GLD down 1.97%. BTC down 2.90%.

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Where all three signals stand

All three assets, side by side:

Same 8 weeks, indexed to the same starting point — Bitcoin’s mid-August surge still dominates the picture, even after this week’s pullback.

The honest part on gold: a SELL that’s only a week old doesn’t prove anything yet. It’s avoided a small decline so far, but one good week doesn’t validate a signal any more than one bad week invalidates it — the discipline is in following it regardless.

The honest part on Bitcoin: the BUY that reversed last Friday is now down 2.90% in its first week. That’s the flip side of publishing every signal live — sometimes the very next week tests it immediately, and this was one of those weeks.

Why a quiet week still matters

No flips is itself a data point. SPY’s 162-day BUY didn’t waver despite a down week. Gold’s brand-new SELL didn’t get second-guessed just because it’s young. And Bitcoin’s brand-new BUY didn’t get abandoned after one rough week, even though a rough first week is exactly the kind of thing that tempts people to override a system. Next scheduled update: Saturday, September 19, 6:00 AM ET.

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Full transparency: every recent flip

Why the system doesn’t need a reason to sit still

A quiet week can feel like nothing happened, but it’s the same discipline as a week with two flips: the system reads price, and this week price didn’t cross any of the lines that matter. That’s it. No CPI surprise, no Fed-odds headline, no rough week for stocks gets a vote — only where the price actually is relative to the rule. Some weeks that produces two flips. This week it produced zero. Both are the system working exactly as designed.

A quick favor. If this issue was useful, please subscribe and share it with a friend who’d benefit from 20+ years of original systematic research. It genuinely helps. Thank you for reading.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice or a recommendation, and I am not a registered investment adviser. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. The signals reflect backtested and now live-tracked quantitative models; past performance, backtested or live, does not guarantee future results. Cryptocurrency is especially volatile and involves risks distinct from traditional securities. Markets involve risk, including loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

This week’s signal, this week’s pick, what to do with both.

Photo by Manuel on Unsplash

Every AI accelerator on earth needs somewhere to put the data it’s crunching, and right now there isn’t enough of it to go around. One company’s high-bandwidth memory has been sold out for the entire year, twice, and its customers are already negotiating for capacity that doesn’t exist yet — in 2027 and 2028.

That kind of demand doesn’t move in a straight line. This stock went from under $70 a share in April last year to over $1,200 by late June this year, then gave back nearly 40% of that in about five weeks, bottoming near $739 in late July, before climbing back above $1,000 by September. Same company, same structural story, wildly different price depending on the week you looked.

My model doesn’t read any of that. It doesn’t know the stock tripled, or that it corrected, or that it’s climbing again. It ranks all 450+ stocks the same quantitative way, every week — and this week, this one landed back at #1.

Capital stays invested — core and pick both.

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And what I buy every Monday

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Market digest: what moved this week

• Friday’s jobs report blew past expectations. August nonfarm payrolls came in at +162,000 versus a ~55,000 consensus, with June and July both revised up a combined 55,000. Unemployment held steady at 4.1%.

• Good news for the economy, not for stocks. A report that strong cuts against the case for a rate cut — Fed funds futures pushed the odds of a hike at the September 16 meeting toward 58%, up from roughly 50% a day earlier. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both slipped on the print, giving back part of Thursday’s gain.

• For the week, the S&P 500 was roughly flat, up about 0.1%, the Dow lost around 0.3%, and the Nasdaq added roughly 0.4% — a choppy week that ended close to where it started.

• Gold and Bitcoin both rallied mid-week on rate-hike fears, then gave it back. Gold pushed toward $430 before easing into Friday; Bitcoin touched $82,262 on Wednesday — its highest print since mid-May — before pulling back under $80,000 on the stronger jobs data.

• Two of three Patala signals flipped this week. Gold’s five-and-a-half-month BUY ended in a SELL. Bitcoin’s brand-new SELL — the very first flip of its live track record — reversed back to BUY, all inside eight trading days.

• Markets are closed Monday, September 7 for Labor Day — the next signal update lands the following Saturday.

Net effect: SPY up 0.11% on the week. GLD down 0.52%. BTC up 2.44%, touching its highest level since May along the way.

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Where all three signals stand

All three signals, side by side:

Same 8 weeks, indexed to the same starting point — Bitcoin’s move dwarfs the other two, and this week’s whipsaw sits right at the top of that run.

The honest part on gold: this BUY ran 177 days and finished down 14.59%. It’s the same story that’s been building for weeks, just now with a final number attached. The system didn’t chase the March breakout price down to make the exit look better, and it didn’t hold on hoping for a bounce once the SELL trigger hit — it just followed the rule.

The honest part on Bitcoin: the SELL that launched this signal to the public lasted exactly one week (Aug 28 – Sep 4) and missed a 2.44% gain, including a $82,262 print mid-week — its highest since May. That’s not a curated result — a brand-new live track record’s first entry is a flip that cost it a small gain, published exactly as it happened.

Why this week doesn’t change anything

A blowout jobs report gave the market a reason to second-guess itself on rate cuts, and SPY’s BUY didn’t so much as flinch. Gold’s exit wasn’t rushed and wasn’t delayed — it came the day the price data called for it, 177 days after the entry. And Bitcoin’s reversal, one week into its public life, got published the same way a six-month gold trade did: no smoothing, no waiting for a “better” exit. Next scheduled update: Saturday, September 12, 6:00 AM ET.

As always: this is not investment advice, and I’m not telling you what to do with your money. What I can tell you is what the discipline of the system calls for — follow the signal, don’t front-run the next update, and don’t let one jobs report pull you outside the plan.

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Full transparency: every recent flip

A couple of honest notes: SPY’s current BUY is up +17.44% (up slightly from +17.31% last week — a flat week, a small gain kept). GLD’s finished BUY closed at -14.59% (from -14.14% last week — the position lost a bit more ground in its final days before the exit). And BTC’s SELL, which opened right at the top of its debut breakout on August 28, closed one week later having missed a 2.44% move — the flip flipped back before the position ever turned negative.

Why the system doesn’t wait for confirmation

Both of this week’s flips — Gold out, Bitcoin back in — happened inside a week that also carried the most consequential jobs report in months. None of that mattered to the signal. It doesn’t read headlines, and it doesn’t wait for a second data point to “confirm” a move before acting. That’s exactly why a losing 177-day gold trade got closed on schedule instead of nursed along, and why a one-week-old Bitcoin SELL got reversed the moment the price action called for it — even though reversing that fast can look, in hindsight, like noise.

A quick favor. If this issue was useful — especially watching two signals flip in the same week — please subscribe and share it with a friend who’d benefit from 20+ years of original systematic research. It genuinely helps. Thank you for reading.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice or a recommendation, and I am not a registered investment adviser. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. The signals reflect backtested and now live-tracked quantitative models; past performance, backtested or live, does not guarantee future results. Cryptocurrency is especially volatile and involves risks distinct from traditional securities. Markets involve risk, including loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

For the month of August, the account is up +8.14%, against +2.68% for SPY over the same stretch (Interactive Brokers 1-month performance screenshot as of Aug 31st)

A couple of things worth knowing before that number gets too much credit:

• No money was added or withdrawn. This is trading performance, plain and simple.

• It wasn’t a smooth ride. The account was down more than -5% in the first week before recovering, then bounced between roughly +5% and +14% for the rest of the month before settling at +8.14% on the close. Systematic doesn’t mean comfortable — it means staying in your seat through the parts that don’t feel good.

How these updates work: every monthly portfolio update comes in two parts.

Part 1 explains how the strategy works — it’s the same every month.

Part 2 is the actual deep dive: every position in the account, what changed, and how it performed.

Part 1: The Strategy

Every monthly update starts here. The strategy doesn’t change month to month — only the numbers do. If you’ve read this part before, feel free to skip ahead to Part 2.

One signal. That’s it.

Everything in this portfolio comes down to one quant timing signal, built over twenty-plus years. It has two parts:

• A macro model that makes one BUY or SELL call on the first trading day of each month.

• A daily model that splits the market into 158 zones. Only 11 of them trigger a SELL — so the signal stays invested through normal ups and downs, and only steps aside when things get genuinely dangerous.

Put together, the signal flips about 9–12 times a year. That’s the whole job: check it, act if it flips, sit tight the rest of the time.

Here’s what that’s done in backtesting, verified independently through Portfolio Visualizer:

• SPY, since January 2000: a hypothetical $10,000 grows to $1.75 million, with a worst drawdown of just -8.5% — versus -50.8% for simply buying and holding.

• QQQ, same 26+ years: $10,000 grows to $9.2 million (a 29.28% annual return) versus $90,406 for buy-and-hold (8.64%). The signal also sidestepped the dot-com crash’s brutal 81% collapse, with a worst drawdown of only -9.97%.

The signal doesn’t win by picking better stocks — it owns the exact same index either way. It wins by simply not being there for the crashes.

The Core: your engine

You get to choose what the signal drives:

• SPY — 500 companies, broadly diversified, steadier. The conservative choice.

• QQQ — 100 growth-heavy names, more volatile, historically higher-returning. The aggressive choice.

Whichever you pick becomes your Core — what you hold whenever the signal says BUY.

For those who want to go further, the same signal applied to TQQQ (a 3x-leveraged Nasdaq-100 fund) turned a hypothetical $10,000 into $1.56 billion over a 16-year backtest (2010–2026), versus $3.2 million for buy-and-hold. A few honest caveats come with that number:

• It’s a hypothetical backtest, not real trading.

• The window starts near the bottom of a historic bull run.

• Leverage decays in choppy, sideways markets.

• This isn’t a recommendation to hold 3x leverage unhedged.

Still, the same mechanism is doing the work: the signal’s worst drawdown on TQQQ was -26.03%, versus a 79.08% buy-and-hold collapse in 2022.

The Plus: one high-conviction stock a week

On top of the Core sits QuantRanks, the stock-picking half of the model. Here’s how it works:

• Every Sunday at 6:00 pm ET, the model surfaces its top-ranked pick from a universe of 450+ stocks.

• It’s funded by trimming a small slice of the Core, then bought the following Monday.

• It’s held until the signal flips to SELL — at which point Core and picks all go to cash together.

• There’s no separate exit rule and no price target for individual picks. The signal governs the whole portfolio.

Two guardrails keep the stock sleeve from taking over:

• Each buy is typically sized around 3% of the portfolio. That’s not a hard cap on the stock itself, though — if the same name stays in the top-ranked picks for multiple weeks running, I’ll keep adding to it each time it reappears.

• The sleeve as a whole is capped at 50%, so at least half the book always stays in the Core.

Why “Core-Plus”

Three layers, three jobs:

• The Signal decides when — invested or in cash.

• The Core decides what you hold — SPY, QQQ, or a leveraged version.

• The Picks decide what you add — one high-conviction stock a week.

Full backtests and methodology:

The Simplest Investment System in the World · $10,000 in the Nasdaq Since 2000 · Same Signal + 3x the Leverage · The Patala Core-Plus Strategy

The headline number

For the month of August, the account is up +8.14%, against +2.68% for SPY over the same stretch.

Here’s the full breakdown of how my portfolio stood on August 31 — every asset, and its exact weight in the book. Except for the 4 QuantRanks stocks I published and bought starting August 10, everything else here was a pre-existing position that makes up the Core of an aggressive portfolio.

Part 2: Inside the August Portfolio

What’s actually in the account?

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A free subscription gets you:

1. Weekly trade signals on SPY, BTC, and GLD + real-time flip alerts.

2. The stock I buy every Monday.

3. Monthly live portfolio performance & all holdings.

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Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

Every major pharmaceutical company on earth has spent decades and billions chasing the same goal: teaching the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer the way it already destroys a virus. It’s one of medicine’s oldest, most expensive, most repeatedly disappointed pursuits.

Ten days ago, one press release suggested someone may have actually gotten close. A personalized vaccine, built on the same platform behind a shot most of the world already has in its arm, hit both primary goals in a late-stage melanoma trial — fewer recurrences, less spread. It’s the first trial of its kind to succeed at this stage. Not a cure, not yet approved — but real. The stock jumped as much as 160% in a single session.

Five days later, on no comparable news, it fell nearly 20% in a day. Same company, same week, same story everyone was still arguing about.

My model doesn’t read headlines. It doesn’t know the stock moved 160%, or that it gave much of it back days later. It ranks all 450+ stocks the same quantitative way, every week — and this week, this one landed at #4.

Capital stays invested — core and pick both.

A free subscription gets you:

1. Weekly trade signals on SPY, BTC, and GLD + Real-time flip alerts.

2. The Stock I Buy Every Monday.

3. Live portfolio performance and holdings.

Every Sunday at 6:00 am ET, free. Subscribe here to get next week’s QuantRank in your inbox.

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Disclosure: I personally buy this QuantRank, in the live portfolio, every Monday after publication — never before.

Disclaimer: Educational and informational only. Not personalized investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. I am not a registered investment adviser. Past performance — backtested or live — does not guarantee future results. You can lose money, including a substantial amount. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. Full disclosures in The Patala Core-Plus Strategy.

Market digest: what moved this week

• Stocks stayed choppy near the record. SPY dipped early in the week, clawed back to $771 by Thursday, then eased into the weekend — still shy of the all-time closing high of $777.88 set August 13. The BUY signal, open since early April, didn’t move either way.

• Nvidia beat, but grew more slowly. Q2 revenue of $96.2B and EPS of $2.22 topped estimates, and Q3 guidance of $108B came in above consensus — but with growth decelerating from 106% to guided high-80s% YoY, the stock chopped rather than ran on the print.

• Inflation held steady, not cooler. July core PCE came in at 3.3% YoY, matching expectations and last month’s pace; consumer spending was flat. In-line, not reassuring — the Fed’s target is still a long way off.

• Jackson Hole left the market guessing. New Fed Chair Warsh called inflation “concerning” and didn’t rule out a hike, while also declining to commit to one — no new signal, just more uncertainty into September’s meeting.

• Gold cooled off. After last week’s breakout to multi-month highs, GLD gave back part of the move as the dollar firmed and Treasury yields stabilized.

• Bitcoin was the story of the week. BTC ripped from the low-$70,000s to a fresh high above $80,000 — and then, on the day of publication, the signal flipped to SELL as price pulled back to the high-$70,000s.

• New this week: the Bitcoin signal is live. Same system, same rules, zero discretion — now running on BTC alongside SPY and GLD.

Net effect: SPY up 0.47% on the week. GLD down 3.42%. BTC up sharply through Thursday before the pullback that triggered this week’s flip.

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Where all three signals stand

All three signals, side by side:

Same 8 weeks, indexed to the same starting point — this is what “reads price, not headlines” looks like across three completely different assets at once.

The honest part on gold: this BUY has been open 170 days and is still down 14.14% since it triggered. It’s the same number I published last week, just worse — the system doesn’t round the edges off a rough stretch to make it look better. Same standard of transparency as always.

The honest part on Bitcoin: the signal launched mid-breakout, caught a +6.36% move from $73,032 to $77,677 (Aug 20 → Aug 28), and flipped to SELL on the very day of publication. That’s not a curated result — it’s the actual sequence, published as it happened. Nothing was cherry-picked to make the debut look good or bad, and the fresh SELL now sits at 0 days with no track record of its own yet.

Why this week doesn’t change anything

SPY chopping around near its record didn’t make the system flinch in either direction. A five-week gold rally didn’t stop it from giving back ground normally this week. And Bitcoin’s flip to SELL — arriving on literally the first weekend this signal is public — didn’t get smoothed over, delayed, or explained away. It reads price, not headlines, and it reads all three assets exactly the same way. Next scheduled update: Saturday, September 5, 6:00 AM ET.

As always: this is not investment advice, and I’m not telling you what to do with your money. What I can tell you is what the discipline of the system calls for — follow the signal, don’t front-run the next update, and don’t let one hot week or one flip pull you outside the plan.

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Full transparency: every recent flip

Why add Bitcoin now

The system doesn’t care what the asset is — SPY, GLD, or BTC, it’s the same mechanical rules applied without opinion. Bitcoin has produced some of the largest gaps between buy-and-hold and signal-following in backtesting, precisely because of stretches like the one that just ended: a fast, emotional run that the system rode without getting greedy, and then exited without hesitation the moment the trend turned. Publishing it live, starting today, means you see every flip from here forward — the good ones and the bad ones, in real time.

A quick favor. If this issue was useful — especially the new Bitcoin signal — please subscribe and share it with a friend who’d benefit from 20+ years of original systematic research. It genuinely helps. Thank you for reading.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice or a recommendation, and I am not a registered investment adviser. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. The signals reflect backtested and now live-tracked quantitative models; past performance, backtested or live, does not guarantee future results. Cryptocurrency is especially volatile and involves risks distinct from traditional securities. Markets involve risk, including loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.

Bitcoin is too chaotic to trade with rules, right?

A quantitative signal turned Bitcoin’s worst drawdown from -75.57% to -43.00%, while still compounding at 135% a year.

Bitcoin doesn’t just crash in a panic. It’s had nine drawdowns of 7%+ since 2016, including two multi-year stretches that erased 73-76% of buy-and-hold value. The damage isn’t the crash — it’s the year-plus grind back to even.

That’s why this signal exists. Not to predict Bitcoin’s next move. Just discipline for when to be in it, and when to step aside.

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$10,000, Bitcoin, two paths, ten years

Same BTC. Same $10,000. One line holds it. The other follows the signal — in on BUY, cash on SELL.

The gains are nice. The drawdowns are the point.

Buy-and-hold Bitcoin has been cut in half or worse twice since 2016 — 75.57% in 2018, 73.01% in 2021-2022. The signal’s worst: -43.00%, recovered in 8 months. Across all nine completed drawdowns, the average time back to breakeven was under 6 months — the one exception is the current stretch, still underwater since August 2025.

The full dashboard, no cherry-picking

Better risk-adjusted return, shallower worst-case, at the same time. Verified in Portfolio Visualizer — not a spreadsheet model.

A few numbers from that table worth translating out of finance-speak: standard deviation (60.77% vs. 72.83%) means the ride itself is smoother, not just the worst day. Benchmark correlation of 0.81 means the signal still moves with Bitcoin most of the time — this isn’t a market-neutral strategy, it’s a better-timed version of the same asset. And an information ratio of 1.77 — the return earned per unit of tracking error versus just holding Bitcoin — is the kind of number that’s rare to see outside of quant funds with a lot more infrastructure than a weekly newsletter.

Annual returns, Jan 2016-Jul 2026

Four red years across eleven. Every one shallower than buy-and-hold’s equivalent down year. 2017 and 2021 show it kept pace on the good years too.

This is the kind of update most newsletters wait out. Subscribe if you want these, not just the highlight reels.

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How it works

Simple. No screen-watching. I publish the signal so you always know the position.

One honest note: this is a high-turnover system — about 69 trades a year, median hold 3 days. Bitcoin just moves faster than stocks or gold. Flip alerts go out same-day, not weekly.

Another one: there are no stop-losses. I’ve tried them, and they’ve never worked for me — they get whipsawed out of positions right before the move you were waiting for. The only exit is the signal itself flipping. If it says stay in, you stay in, drawdown and all.

What’s next

Live BTC signals start Saturday, August 29 — alongside SPY and GLD, flip alerts the moment the position changes.

Already published: SPY backtest · QQQ backtest · TQQQ backtest · GLD backtest

Same rules. One asset that never closes. Same discipline either way.

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Disclaimer: I am not a registered investment adviser, and nothing here is personalized investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer of advisory services. This publication is for informational and educational purposes only. Performance figures are backtested using historical data and a mechanical application of the signal rule described above, verified independently in Portfolio Visualizer; backtested results are hypothetical, have inherent limitations, and do not guarantee future results. The strategy’s ~725 trades across the backtest period do not reflect transaction costs, slippage, or tax drag, all of which would reduce real-world returns. Past performance — backtested or live — does not guarantee future results. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and speculative assets. Consult a qualified financial adviser before investing. You are solely responsible for your own decisions.