Viability Evaluation of the Turtle Trading Rules on Major Market Indexes

Sammanfattning: The Turtle Trading Rules was a successful trend-following trading strategy for commodities in the 1980s but has lost recognition in recent days. The strategy revolved around rules for entering and exiting trades as well as position sizing for each trade. The rules was based on the fundamental aim to capture market trends while at the same time maintaining a controlled risk exposure. This thesis aims to revise the Turtle Trading Rules, here applied on major market indexes, and to examine its viability through different financial metrics. This is done by first implementing the aforementioned trading strategy to the indexes, and later by synthesizing market data through Geometric Brownian Motions. The latter primarily to examine how the strategy perform in different financial environments, what market traits favor the strategy, and to complement the previous examination without altering the core principles of the Turtle Trading Rules. The results suggest that the revised rules for major market indexes is not viable. This because of the poor return, the highest achieved 20-year return and average annual return was 25.1 % and 1.4% respectively (without taking trading fees into account). Furthermore, the strategy applied on synthetic data suggests that favorable traits are highly cyclical data with low volatility, which seldom is the case for real financial time series. The results further indicate that the main issue lies in the rules not being able to distinguish noise from actual entry and exit triggers. Moreover, the drawdown further suggest that it is the exit rather than the entry rules that are to blame for the poor performance during the cycle of a trade.