Fun with Numbers

**FundSurfer** · 01-14-2005, 01:02 PM

2004 Average Daily Gain by Day of the Week
Fund Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

G 0.03% 0.01% 0.01% 0.01% 0.02%

F 0.00% 0.03% 0.01% 0.01% 0.03%

C 0.06% 0.12% 0.09% -0.04% -0.01%

S -0.02% 0.23% 0.10% -0.08% 0.11%

I 0.05% 0.09% 0.02% 0.07% 0.14%

2004 Maximum Possible Gain

(If you had picked the right fund to be 100% invested each day.)

149.34%

2004 Maximum Possible Loss

(If you had picked the worst fund to be 100% invested each day.)

-123.99%

What I didn't post was the standard deviation for those weekday numbers. As you might imagine, they were very high, which means highly variable.

However, I think we can say a couple things. G gives the penny most often on Monday. Interest accrues daily whereas the market only goes up/down on trading days. Therefore if the penny was due Sat/Sun/Mon, then Monday get it.

If we were to use this to allocate, we would have allocated:
Monday C, Tuesday S, Wednesday S, Thursday I, Friday I

Your return for 2004 would have been 30% if you'd used this formula.

My bet is that this method would not back test well. Probably very badly.

**jgpalmerdds** · 01-14-2005, 01:50 PM

Fund Surfer,

Your the man (or women) How long did it take you to figure all that out? Impressive.

**Rod** · 01-14-2005, 03:06 PM

This seems very similar to my "system" I was trying out back in Oct/Nov:

Monday: 100 G

Tuesday: 100 S

Wednesday: 30 G 50 S 20 I

Thursday: 100 G

Friday: 50 S 50 I

Of course, my missing some of the election rally threw a wrench into it.

**FundSurfer** · 01-14-2005, 03:51 PM

Spreadsheets are a wonderful thing. It allows you to play all sorts of fun games with numbers. I just took the table off tsp.gov; calculated daily percentage move; then sorted by day of the week; and finally summed the result. Actually didn't take that long. At some point in time I need to do this with a longer term data set.

**Rod** · 01-14-2005, 04:01 PM

FundSurfer wrote:

Spreadsheets are a wonderful thing. It allows you to play all sorts of fun games with numbers. I just took the table off tsp.gov; calculated daily percentage move; then sorted by day of the week; and finally summed the result. Actually didn't take that long. At some point in time I need to do this with a longer term data set.

I did the same thing using pen & paper.

But it looks like we came up with the same results!

Believe me though, this "system" wasn't fairing well after the election. You can read more aboutthat on page 2 of my account talk. I believeI mention a thing or 2 about it.

I wonder when would be a good time to calculate this out again???