Buy and hold is a long term trend following strategy with no risk control. If you can't beat the S&P index you probably shouldn't be trading.
What you call "painful", we call it "risk". You can't make big money without risk. Also, when you see both gold and QQQ dive, it would be the best opportunity to buy. The reasoning is gold dive because it see interest is raising in the near future. While interest rise because it see significant economy growth in the near future. QQQ dive because short term valuation compared with interest rate. Yet significant economy growth means QQQ will rise significantly in the near future.
I'm not sure I agree, if my portfolio is large and I have a low vol strategy, that generates an income. At the end of the day you take the $ not the %
Then you are only fooling yourself. You measure performance against a benchmark in percentage. Sure you can say your portfolio earned $100 but unless you know the size of the portfolio it means nothing.
That sounds stupid, as some excuse, for underperforming. (Nothing personal) Back to original post, - beating an index is easy. (Index is full of garbage) Beating yourself with discipline - that's the hard part. First the right character (as foundation), then habbits and skills on it. Yet most folk who end up in the game have degenerate gambler mindsets/personalities.
You can easily find daily data for the price of gold going back to ~1980. Also not difficult to simulate TQQQ back to 1985. Re-run your backtest starting in 1985. Also, to be conservative, shouldn't you assume that the 2000 bear market WILL happen again, and perhaps even to a much worse extent?
I don't know how to find historical gold daily data, can you share a link? Nor I know how to simulate TQQQ, The OP of that thread did that. For my GOLD + TQQQ strategy, the more severe the bear market, the bigger the profit. Because gold will go up more, and TQQQ will go down more. That will allow my strategy to load much more TQQQ.