SMA Signal Effectiveness Across Stock ETFs

Simple moving averages (SMA) are perhaps the most widely used and simplest market regime indicators. For example, many investors estimate that a stock index, exchange-traded fund (ETF) or individual stock priced above (below) its 200-day SMA is in a good (bad) regime. Do SMA signals/signal combinations usefully and consistently distinguish good and bad regimes across different kinds of U.S. stock ETFs? To investigate, we test regime signals of 50-day, 100-day and 200-day SMAs and combinations of them across broad equity market (DIA, SPY, IWB, IWM and QQQ), equity style (IWD, IWF, IWN and IWO) and equity sector (XLB, XLE, XLF, XLI, XLK, XLP, XLU, XLV and XLY) ETFs. We consider also three individual stocks: Apple (AAPL), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) and Wal-Mart (WMT). We focus on compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and maximum drawdown (MaxDD) for comparisons, but also look at a few other performance metrics. Using daily dividend-adjusted closes of these 18 ETFs and three stocks during late July 2000 (limited by IWN and IWO) through early May 2023, we find that: