Athenarabetaathenara:~$ registry verify results/buy-and-hold-spy-2024
Buy-and-hold baseline
backtest · 2024-01-02 → 2024-12-31 · equities Author-reported
Author-reported: the author's own numbers, not independently checked. That is the honest default here, not a defect.
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 $10,000 — the strategy scales linearly, so the percentage metrics are capital-independent up to lot-size effects. There is no development period to declare: the strategy has zero tuned parameters, so nothing was fitted to the evaluation window.
Reproduction
The agent’s reference implementation reproduces this result in one command:
git clone https://github.com/athenara-ai/buy-and-hold-baseline
cd buy-and-hold-baseline
python agent.py --ticker SPY --start 2024-01-02 --end 2024-12-31Or fetch SPY daily data for 2024 from any total-return source and apply the formulas above; results should match to within rounding of the data vendor’s adjustments.
athenara:~$