The Max strategy scans 96 stocks every market close and names one top-ranked pick with a concrete buy price, a sell target scaled to the stock’s 14-day ATR, and a matching stop-loss (both capped at +25% / −12%). If neither fires within 12 months, close at market. Backtest 2006–2026: +29.3% CAGR vs SPY DCA’s +6.6% — Calmar 0.71, 60% win rate, avg winner +23%, avg loser −12%. For DCA investors who want to know which stock this month and when to sell. Not financial advice.
The Max strategy’s picks for this month, ranked by the CAP5+SMA12M opportunity score (trailing 12-month mean of conviction). The headline card is the take-profit play: buy the top-ranked stock at today’s close. The sell target and stop-loss are sized to each stock’s own 14-day ATR — tight around low-vol names like KO/PG, wider on high-vol names like SMCI/AMD — capped at +25% / −12% to preserve tail protection. Close at market after 12 months if neither hits. Backtested 2006–2026: +29.3% CAGR, 60% win rate, avg winner +23%, avg loser −12%. Rows 2–5 show the next picks with their own TP/SL — if you’d rather spread $1,000 across 5 names (CAP5 rank-weighted DCA, hold-forever variant), use the allocation column. These picks come from today’s scan; they are not financial advice.
Why this beats SPY DCA by 22pp. Fixed +10% / −15% targets misprice volatility: a +10% move on KO is 5σ rare, on SMCI it’s daily noise. Scaling by ATR lets each trade pursue a proportional move. In 20Y backtest, the 60% of trades that hit TP do so at avg +23% (not +10%), while capped stops cap avg loser at −12%. The win/loss magnitude ratio is ~2:1; combined with 60% hit rate, that produces +29.3% CAGR, Calmar 0.71, 41% MDD — winner in all 6 rolling 10Y windows.
Alternative: CAP5 rank-weighted DCA (hold-forever). If you prefer the older “spread $1k across 5 names, never sell” approach, it’s still visible in the weight column of the picks table. Backtest: +18.3% CAGR, gives no sell signal. The take-profit variant with dynamic TP/SL outperforms this by ~11pp CAGR while giving retail-friendly concrete entry/exit prices. Either approach is replicable from the published rules; neither is financial advice.
Snapshot of cumulative cost basis per ticker for a hypothetical investor who started this strategy in April 2021 and contributed $1,000/month. A ticker is “capped” when its share reaches 5% — subsequent months skip it and backfill from the next candidate. PnL% shown is the simple return on cumulative basis vs current position value.
Each month the top-ranked stock is bought at the next trading day’s close. The sell
target is set at entry × (1 + 7 × ATR14% of price), capped at +25%
max. The stop-loss is symmetric: entry × (1 − 7 × ATR14%),
capped at −12%. Low-vol stocks (KO, PG) get tight ~±7% targets; mid-vol
names (UNH, JPM) get ~±14%; high-vol names (SMCI, AMD) cap at +25%/−12%.
If neither fires within 252 trading days, close at market (happened 0 times in backtest).
Benchmark: monthly DCA into SPY.
Honest caveats: universe-level survivorship bias (128-ticker roster = today’s survivors); the quality multiplier in the scoring feed uses today’s value at historical dates (a known concession — the rest of the score is strictly point-in-time); TP/SL fills assume limit orders fill exactly at target price when intraday High ≥ TP or Low ≤ SL (real fills can be worse in crises); idle-cash drag is real (20–30 bps/yr with a MMF at 4%); the −41% MDD is real — if you can’t hold a position down −12% and maybe 3–4 in a row during a crash, this isn’t for you. Past performance does not predict future results. Not financial advice.
max/research/, the monthly picks are published on this page.max/research/ — especially step41 (fixed-TP grid), step44 (stop-loss sweep), step45–47 (dynamic-exit winner validation).Every stock below is ranked by the CAP5+SMA12M opportunity score (trailing 12-month mean of conviction). This is the same scoring used to name this month’s pick. The TP% / SL% / ATR14% columns show the dynamic exit prices a retail investor would place if buying that stock today (GTC limit sell at +TP%, stop-loss at −SL%, close at market after 12 months if neither hits).
The production strategy: $1,000 every month into the top-1 stock by CAP5+SMA12M. Each trade gets a dynamic TP/SL sized to the stock’s own ATR14: TP = entry × (1 + max(5%, min(7 × ATR14%, 25%))), SL = entry × (1 − max(5%, min(7 × ATR14%, 12%))). Exit at first close ≥ TP or ≤ SL, else close at market after 252 trading days. Entry at next trading day’s close. Benchmark: SPY DCA on the same monthly cadence. Results below are precomputed server-side on each data refresh over the embedded recent-5Y spine. The full 20-year Python backtest (+29.3% CAGR, +22.6pp over SPY DCA) is summarised in the 20-Year Validation card above.
Prior strategy for comparison: $1,000 every month into the top-ranked stocks (by CAP5+SMA12M), split by rank weights (1/1, 1/2, 1/3… normalized so #1 gets ~44%, #5 gets ~9%). Entry at next trading day’s close. Positions held forever — no sell. 5% per-ticker concentration cap drops any name whose cost basis has hit 5% of total invested. Benchmark: SPY DCA. 20Y CAGR +18.3% for the CAP5 hold-forever; the current dynamic TP strategy (above) clocked +29.3% CAGR in the same period — see the 20-Year Validation card.
Pick a horizon. The listing ranks every stock by its probability at that horizon in similar historical pullbacks.
$1,000 every month into the top-ranked stocks (by point-in-time opportunity score), held for the selected horizon, then sold. Benchmark: SPY DCA on the same schedule.