The Honest Backtest Census: How Often Famous Strategies Beat Buy & Hold (Release 2026-09-25)

An openly-licensed aggregate dataset. As of September 25, 2026, 25 famous, named trading strategies were each backtested on 36 liquid US stocks & ETFs — 900 strategy-asset combinations, of which 839 had enough trades to judge (61 were too thin and excluded). Of those judged, about 86% failed to beat simply buying and holding the same asset over the same 5-year window — net of costs and slippage, with no look-ahead. This is a survivorship-biased set of well-known assets, measured over the full period with no out-of-sample split, against each asset's own buy & hold, and is not significance-tested. The data covers beat/fail rate by asset class (stocks & ETFs is the headline; crypto and "all" are context only — a small, volatile, survivorship-biased sample, not a demonstrated edge); beat/fail rate for all 25 strategies; and strategy vs buy & hold maximum-drawdown percentiles. Aggregate rates only — no per-trade records, no equity curves, no per-combination rows, no strategy parameters, and not the engine. Canonical page: https://stratsemble.com/methodology/census/2026-09-25 · Methodology: https://stratsemble.com/methodology