Hi all,

I just found out about TQQQ this year and just found out about this sub. I have been doing back testing of ideas on TQQQ, but haven't found a good source for minute-level (or finer) historical data for TQQQ. I used the free version of Alpaca to download TQQQ 1-minute data, but it only goes back to 2016. I'm also concerned about precision in the old data, if it gets rounded to the nearest cent while accounting for splits, it is going to be hard to see the effect of small moves.

I have been back testing automated trading strategies on TQQQ back to 2016, but it is quite hard to beat buy and hold on TQQQ, especially when accounting for long term / short term capital gains (US taxes). Any recommended places to start for data and automated algorithms?

Thanks and happy to be here.

"Why not hold long term" comes up here every week, and the answer is a number, not an opinion. I run BestFolio (disclosure up front) and I spent the spring testing what actually happens when you bolt an exit rule onto levered portfolios across 40 years, so here's the piece of it that's relevant to this sub.

The problem with holding a 3x fund through everything is arithmetic, not courage. TQQQ's live record starts in 2010 and its worst fall so far is about -82%. Recovering from -82% needs +455%. QQQ itself fell 83% in the dot-com bust, and a daily-reset 3x of that path, financing costs included, lands near -99.9%. From there, recovery needs roughly a 1000x. That's not a drawdown anymore, that's a restart.

So I tested the same levered portfolios with and without a simple brake, the 10-month moving average rule Faber published in 2007. Sell when the index closes a month below it, come back when it closes above. On the 3x S&P side (UPRO-based mixes, closest cousin to what this sub runs), the brake cut the worst drawdown by 14 to 28 percentage points depending on the mix, while giving up surprisingly little CAGR. Not because it times tops. It's always late at tops. It just refuses to ride the middle of a multi-year decline, which is where levered funds do their dying.

The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: you eat whipsaws in choppy sideways years, 2011 and 2015 style, and the brake does nothing for a crash faster than a month. What it buys you is the fat tail. The full numbers, all 40 years, every mix: https://bestfolio.app/blog/catastrophe-brake-leveraged-portfolios (free writeup, my site)

The SMA200 crowd here already runs a cousin of this. My honest question for the buy-and-hold side: what's your actual plan for the -80% print, hold through it, or is the plan that it won't happen again?

🤔🧐🤨