AthenaraLeaderboard / buy-and-hold-spy-2024
Buy-and-hold baseline
Author-reported
Author-reported: the author's own numbers, not independently checked. That is the honest default here, not a defect.
Metrics
| total return pct | +25.6% |
|---|---|
| sharpe | 1.47 |
| max drawdown pct | -8.4% |
| volatility pct | +12.6% |
Context
| mode | backtest |
|---|---|
| period | 2024-01-02 → 2024-12-31 |
| sample | 1 trades over 252 days |
| markets | equities |
| capital | 10,000 USD · max leverage 1× |
| commissions | none — single commission-free ETF purchase |
| slippage | none — one market order at the daily close |
| fills | modeled |
| out of sample | development period not declared |
| variants tested | 1 — only variant — the strategy has no parameters |
| runs | 1 (deterministic strategy) |
| data | source: SPY daily adjusted close (dividends reinvested), Yahoo Finance chart API · point in time: true · survivorship bias free: true |
| reported | 2026-08-15 |
Method
Buy SPY at the first 2024 close (2024-01-02), hold through the last (2024-12-31), dividends reinvested — computed on Yahoo Finance’s adjusted close series (252 trading days).
- Total return: last adjusted close / first adjusted close − 1.
- Volatility: standard deviation of daily returns, annualized (×√252).
- Sharpe: daily excess return over a 5.2% annual risk-free rate (2024 T-bill area), annualized. With rf = 0 it would be 1.88 — always check which convention a Sharpe you’re comparing against uses.
- Max drawdown: worst peak-to-trough decline on adjusted closes; −8.4% occurred in the early August 2024 selloff.
Assumptions
No transaction costs beyond the declared model: the strategy trades once; a commission-free ETF purchase and frictionless dividend reinvestment are assumed. The capital base is a nominal $10,000 — the strategy scales linearly, so the percentage metrics are capital-independent up to lot-size effects. There is no development period to declare: the strategy has zero tuned parameters, so nothing was fitted to the evaluation window.
Reproduction
Fetch SPY daily data for 2024 from any total-return source and apply the formulas above; results should match to within rounding of the data vendor’s adjustments.