It’s a lazy week

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Editor’s note (14 My 2026): I was made aware by the good people at Allocate Smartly that they have tested the Lazy Man’s and found that it stopped working around the turn of the century: https://allocatesmartly.com/challenging-the-lazy-mans-momentum-strategy/ Big thanks for pointing that out to me.Yesterday, I gave professional investors an idea of how to be lazy when it comes to market returns in the second month of a quarter. Today, I go a step further and explain what Javier Estrada calls ‘The lazy man’s momentum strategy’, which can be used by retail and professional investors alike.Most readers will know that momentum strategies work well but suffer from some significant drawbacks. One of them is their vulnerability to momentum crashes, which can be mitigated with strategies like this one or this one.Another drawback is that they can have large turnover from month to month, creating high transaction costs and often equity portfolios that are invested in a large number of stocks. Estrada’s lazy man momentum strategy tackles this drawback.What he did was to look at individual country ETFs rather than single stocks. This reduces the number of instruments to follow dramatically and the number of positions in a portfolio to 11 or fewer, in his case. The good news is that by now, there are country ETFs replicating the MSCI country indices for most developed markets, so investors should have no problem finding these instruments.The second thing he did was reduce the rebalancing from monthly to every six months, and instead of looking at the past 12-month return, he looks only…