Weekly Entry + 7% Target on XLF
Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund — S&P 500 banks, insurers and asset managers. Backtest 2021-01-04 → 2026-07-17, $10,000 starting capital, computed by the same engine that runs live DeployQuant strategies.
Year by year
| Year | weekly 7% target | buy & hold |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 33.1% | 35.8% |
| 2022 | −20.5% | −10.4% |
| 2023 | 14.0% | 11.9% |
| 2024 | 20.3% | 29.9% |
| 2025 | 10.7% | 15.5% |
| 2026 | 0.2% | 2.8% |
The rules
Buy at the first open of each week, rest a +7% profit target, and cut the trade Thursday afternoon if it's losing.
- WHEN the first session of the week opens · IF not invested · THEN buy with 98% of the sleeve (once per week)
- WHILE invested · a managed limit order rests at entry price × 1.07
- WHEN it's 2:00pm on the week's second-to-last session · IF the position is losing · THEN sell everything
A rhythm-based swing template: enter Monday, aim for +7%, and refuse to carry a loser into the weekend. The profit target rests at the broker as a real limit order the whole time (DeployQuant maintains it as a managed order), and the Thursday-afternoon exit gives losing trades a hard deadline instead of a hard price.
Good for: volatile assets that regularly swing 7% within a week — leveraged ETFs are the natural habitat.
Watch out: the time-based exit realizes many small losses by design; the wager is that the +7% winners outnumber them, which the per-ETF results test directly.
Build it from blocks (or type it in English), backtest it on 5.5 years of minute data in seconds, tweak any parameter, then paper trade it on live data. No card, no broker needed to start.
Frequently asked questions
Did weekly 7% target beat buy-and-hold on XLF?
Over 2021-01-04–2026-07-17, weekly 7% target on XLF returned 8.7% annualized vs 14.1% for buy-and-hold — it trailed buy-and-hold by 5.4% per year, with a maximum drawdown of 31.6% (buy-and-hold: 25.5%).
How many trades did it make?
98 completed round trips over 5.5 years (197 fills), with 26% of round trips closing profitably.
Why exit on Thursday?
It's a deadline, not a signal: the template refuses to hold a losing trade over the weekend gap. On holiday-shortened weeks DeployQuant's calendar logic shifts the exit to the week's second-to-last session automatically.
Does the 7% target rest at the broker?
Yes — deployed live, the target is a real GTC limit order DeployQuant places and maintains, not a price alert checked after the fact.
Related
Backtests are hypothetical, computed by DeployQuant's engine on minute-resolution consolidated US market data (2021-01-04 to 2026-07-17, $10,000 starting capital, no margin, fees and slippage not modeled) and do not guarantee future results. Nothing on this page is investment advice. Live trading involves risk of loss.