Backtesting ‘buy the fucking dip’

Yes, yes, ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’. But here’s a strategy that has, so far, worked out pretty well the whole ongoing 21st century: BTFD. ‘Stonks always go up’. Really, they have, and why should COVID make for any different?

For this post I’m going to go over the daily SPY graph on TradingView from January 1st 2001 to now, employing these rules of buying and never selling:

• I have about $100,000 to spend over all that time. I know this is a sum a great many humans will never have, but to me and probably most of the crowd reading Medium, not really something impossible to save up over 20 years
• I buy $1000 at a time, because I’m imagining living through this period and money needs to be earned first to be invested, we don’t do smaller buys because fees would go way over 1% of our trades this way, 1% I deem acceptable
• I buy only when the market is down (below EMA 200) and there’s a significant spike in volume
• I always buy the close

I’ve marked all the dips I’d definitely like to get into. I’m not going to pretend I’d be a wise philosopher-king always knowing when to…