Why 20 Years Matters
Most trading strategies are backtested over months, maybe a year or two. That's not enough. If your backtest only covers a bull market, you have no idea what happens when the market crashes. If it only covers a low-volatility environment, you don't know how it behaves when the VIX spikes to 80.
Quanntick's TrendFollower algorithm has been backtested from approximately 2006 through the present — spanning roughly 20 years of S&P 500 futures data. That includes some of the most extreme market environments in modern history.
We didn't cherry-pick a favorable time window. We tested across everything the market threw at us and asked one question: does this strategy survive and profit across all of it?
What 20 Years of Market Data Includes
Think about what's happened in the S&P 500 since 2006:
The 2008 Financial Crisis. A 57% drawdown from peak to trough. Banks failing. Lehman Brothers collapsing. The VIX hitting 80. Circuit breakers triggering. Markets moving 5-10% in a single day. If your strategy can't handle 2008, it can't handle reality.
The 2010 Flash Crash. The Dow dropped nearly 1,000 points in minutes, then recovered almost as fast. Algorithms that depended on orderly market conditions were destroyed. Stops were blown through. Liquidity evaporated.
The 2011 European Debt Crisis. Months of choppy, directionless price action punctuated by violent selloffs on headlines about Greece, Italy, and Spain.
The 2015-2016 China Slowdown. Sharp corrections followed by sharp recoveries. False breakdowns. Whipsaws.
The 2018 Volatility Spike. The VIX went from 10 to 50 in days. The short volatility trade blew up. XIV was liquidated overnight.
2020: COVID-19. The fastest bear market in history — 34% decline in 23 trading days. Followed by the fastest recovery in history. Unprecedented monetary policy. Limit-down circuit breakers.
2022: The Rate Hike Cycle. A sustained bear market driven by Federal Reserve tightening. The S&P 500 fell 25% over nine months. Trend reversals, bear market rallies, and relentless grinding lower.
2023-2025: The AI Rally. A massive bull run driven by artificial intelligence hype, mega-cap tech concentration, and shifting rate expectations.
A strategy that was only tested on 2023-2025 data would tell you nothing about survivability. Testing across all of these regimes is the only way to build genuine confidence.
What is Trend Following?
At its core, the TrendFollower does one thing: it identifies when the S&P 500 futures are trending — either up or down — and positions itself in the direction of that trend.
The algorithm uses 4-minute bars and runs 24 hours a day, 5 days a week (Sunday evening through Friday afternoon). It's always watching, always processing new data, and always ready to act when conditions meet its criteria.
When a trend is identified, the algorithm enters a position and holds it until either the profit target is reached or the stop loss is hit. The stop is set at 0.75% from entry — wide enough to avoid being shaken out by normal market noise, tight enough to contain losses when the trend thesis is wrong.
This is not a day trading strategy. Positions can last hours or days. The algorithm doesn't care about intraday noise — it's looking for the larger directional moves that happen when the market commits to a direction.
What 20 Years of Testing Taught Us
The most important lesson from two decades of data isn't about returns. It's about drawdowns.
Lesson 1: Every strategy has losing periods. The TrendFollower has months where it grinds sideways or takes small losses. This is normal and expected. Trend-following strategies make their money in bursts — capturing large moves — and give back small amounts during choppy, trendless periods. If you can't tolerate two or three losing months in a row, trend following isn't for you.
Lesson 2: The big moves pay for everything. A single large trend — like the March 2020 crash or the 2022 bear market — can produce more profit than months of small wins. The TrendFollower's edge comes from being positioned when these moves happen. Missing even one or two of the big trends in a year can turn a profitable year into a mediocre one.
Lesson 3: Stop placement is everything. The 0.75% stop wasn't chosen because it felt right. It was optimized across the full 20-year dataset. Tighter stops produced more losses from noise. Wider stops increased average loss size without proportionally improving the win rate. The 0.75% level was the empirically optimal balance.
Lesson 4: The strategy works in both directions. Some strategies are secretly long-only — they make money when the market goes up and lose when it goes down. The TrendFollower is genuinely direction-agnostic. It captured the downside in 2008, 2020, and 2022 just as effectively as it captured the upside in 2017, 2021, and 2024.
Lesson 5: Overfitting is the enemy. We deliberately kept the strategy logic simple. More parameters means more ways to overfit to historical data. The TrendFollower uses a small number of rules, each with clear economic rationale. If a rule can't be explained in plain English, it doesn't belong in the strategy.
Backtesting vs. Live Trading
There's an important caveat that every honest system developer should acknowledge: backtests are not live results.
In a backtest, you get perfect fills at the exact price the strategy signals. In live trading, you deal with slippage, partial fills, broker latency, and data feed discrepancies. A strategy that returns 50% annually in backtesting might return 35-40% live after accounting for real-world execution costs.
This is why we run both the TrendFollower and our DayTrader algorithm live, with real money, in real brokerage accounts. The backtest tells us the strategy has a genuine edge. Live trading tells us the edge survives contact with reality.
The TrendFollower has been trading live since November 2025 across both TradeStation and TastyTrade accounts. Every trade is logged, every fill is recorded, and subscribers can compare the live results against the backtested expectations.
Why We Made This Public
Most funds keep their backtests proprietary. We chose transparency for a simple reason: we believe the track record speaks for itself, and the best way to build trust is to show the work.
You can sign up for free paper trading and watch the TrendFollower execute in real time. Compare its behavior against the backtested history. See how it handles trending days, choppy days, news events, and overnight sessions.
Twenty years of data gave us confidence in the strategy. But you don't have to take our word for it — you can verify it yourself.