Rebalance control: 5 Backtests
We backtested 5 rebalance control strategies across ETFs. 0 beat the benchmark before correction; best −1.1 pts/yr.
Every result below is the strategy's annualized return minus an equal-weight benchmark, rebalanced daily, on the same assets and days. Strategies are charged real trading costs; the benchmark pays none. Data stops at the discovery cutoff. See the full family index, the full method and every result, or download the raw registry (JSON).
0 of 5 strategies finished ahead of the benchmark on the raw number, and 0 had an unadjusted p-value under 0.05. After one correction across all 688 tests in the registry, 0 passed, so no result here is a confirmed edge. Scored 2026-10-03, using data up to 2025-03-15. Method: see the evidence page.
How to read these results
"Ahead" means a higher return than the benchmark in this historical test, and "behind" means a lower one. Neither is a confirmed edge. A strategy is only counted as working if it survives a correction for how many strategies were tried, because testing hundreds of ideas will throw up some lucky winners by chance. Rebalance control is grouped by the signal it trades on, not by the asset it was tested on, and every strategy here saw only data up to the same cutoff date, so none could see data another could not.
Results
- Does market activity give a better ETF rebalance clock? (ETFs): behind the benchmark by 1.1 percentage points a year. Not statistically significant. Source: retail trading content: quadratic variation business time ETF portfolio rebalance clock.
- Does limiting an ETF rotation to one replacement work? (ETFs): behind the benchmark by 1.9 percentage points a year. Not statistically significant. Source: retail trading content: turnover constrained ETF momentum portfolio one replacement per rebalance.
- Does confirming the whole ETF target portfolio reduce false rotations? (ETFs): behind the benchmark by 3.6 percentage points a year. Not statistically significant. Source: retail trading content: debounce whole target portfolio five day confirmation ETF rebalancing.
- Does correcting only the largest ETF allocation gap work? (ETFs): behind the benchmark by 6.3 percentage points a year. Not statistically significant. Source: retail trading content: pairwise extreme sleeve transfer rebalancing four asset portfolio.
- Does accumulated allocation error give a better ETF reset rule? (ETFs): behind the benchmark by 6.4 percentage points a year. Not statistically significant. Source: retail trading content: accumulated tracking error budget portfolio rebalancing.