Aggregate Signal Model

Smart Money Confidence is a model that aggregates indicators reflecting sentiment among investors that tend to use the stock market to hedge underlying positions. Or, they're just contrarian investors who prefer to sell into a rising market and buy into a declining one.

Time Frame: Long-Term | Update Schedule: Daily | Source: SentimenTrader

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Construction:

An Aggregate buy/sell signal based on 12 of our core buy/sell signals.

In the simplest form of this model, the idea is to be 100% long when the model reading is > 45% (0.45).

Performance

  • Last updated April 2026
  • Backtest timeframe: 2006-07-01 to 2026-04-30. NOTE: These dates were chosen to provide the same coverage across all signals and ETF's used in those signals and are dependant on ETF start dates.
  • For all backtests shown, we used active and accessible ETF's (e.g., SPY, QQQ, TLT, LQD, etc). The prices of these ETF's are split and dividend adjusted.
  • Shorting is performed by buying inverse ETFs. For these backtests, we used SH to short the S&P500 and PSQ to short the NASDAQ. Using leveraged ETFs like SSO (2x) and UPRO (3x) may increase your returns and drawdowns. NOTE: For the REIT Trading Model, no shorting is done as their isn't an ETF with enough history and activity to cover the timeframe.
  • Historical returns shown below include transaction fees of $1.5 per order (e.g., $3 per round-trip) but does not include slippage.

Model's average annual returns

  1. Model: 9.2%
  2. Model (long/short) - SH: 7.02%
  3. Model (long/short) - PSQ: 6.47%
  4. Model (Multi-Asset Aggregate Bonds) - AGG: 9.39%
  5. Model (Multi-Asset Corporate Bonds) - LQD: 9.66%
  6. Model (Multi-Asset Treasury Bonds) - TLT: 8.76%
  7. Model (Gold) - GLD: 9.8%

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