What fifty years of evidence say about picking stocks, which factors have held up and how badly each has hurt, and where the desk disagrees with its own business: for most people an index fund beats any desk, including this one.
- Index funds vs stock picking: what fifty years of data say
Most professionals trail the index over any long stretch, most individual stocks trail Treasury bills over their lives, and simple arithmetic says the average active dollar must lose after costs. Where that leaves a desk that trades for a living — this one included.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Momentum, value and quality: the factors with evidence, and their drawdowns
Three patterns in stock returns have survived decades of scrutiny. Each has also lost half or more of its value in a stretch most people could not sit through. The evidence, the crashes, the cost of trading them, and what publication does to an edge.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Earnings season: what moves, what does not, and the drift that died
Four times a year a company reports, usually with the market closed, and the stock reopens somewhere else. The premium for holding through the day, the "drift" textbooks still teach that died for large stocks around 2006, what the options market's expected move is worth, and why a stop does not work through a gap.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Trend following on stocks — what moving-average rules did and did not do
A rule as simple as "hold the index while it is above its ten-month average" cut the worst drawdown of the last century roughly in half. It also sat in cash through stretches it should not have, signalled 180 times in 25 years, and looked far better in the backtests than it did afterward. The evidence on both sides, with the numbers.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Education, not advice. Nothing on this page recommends buying or selling anything, and nothing is a promise of results — every figure is hypothetical. TOTH does not provide investment advice. New to the vocabulary? The glossary has plain definitions.