NAAIM–AAII relative-sentiment benchmark

A frozen, point-in-time test of whether professional equity exposure relative to individual-investor stock allocation can scale exposure between SPY and BIL. Of four pre-specified variants, only the continuous V1 rule passed the publication gate.

V1 gate passed 2010-04-08 to 2026-07-29 5 bps one-way cost

Full-window result

PortfolioCAGRVolatilitySharpeMax drawdownExposure
V1 relative sentiment8.92%10.70%0.72-23.00%63.4%
10-month SMA7.71%12.95%0.53-24.72%84.2%
SPY buy and hold13.82%17.15%0.76-33.72%100.0%

Rounded derived statistics. V1 sacrificed return versus SPY while reducing volatility, exposure, and maximum drawdown.

Frozen V1 rule

Smooth NAAIM exposure over 26 weekly observations and AAII stock allocation over two monthly observations, then subtract AAII from NAAIM. After a 36-month minimum history, convert the expanding z-score to a risky weight of clip(0.5 + 0.25z, 0, 1). The remainder holds BIL. Survey observations are usable only after their conservative publication date; trades occur at the next close.

Pre-specified robustness gate

EvaluationV1 CAGRSMA10 CAGRV1 max drawdownSPY max drawdown
Through 20167.16%6.32%-13.37%-18.61%
After 201610.18%8.71%-23.00%-33.72%
Extra-day lag, through 20167.12%6.27%-13.43%-18.61%
Extra-day lag, after 201610.14%8.71%-23.13%-33.72%

V1 met the locked requirement in both subperiods and after delaying both survey sources one additional trading session. V0, V2, and V3 were rejected rather than tuned after inspection.

Important limitations

Reproducibility manifest

This snapshot was retrieved at 2026-07-30T11:02:29.433020+00:00. The base derived-return SHA-256 is 12aadb16852db076e572383da3e307ee3f5acab9b9b7ab06abb249810128fe8e; the extra-day-lag derived-return SHA-256 is 273f12c67114f967aebec0b9f55e3c4e9ef483f8b5212241a6c1bbf0fef5f756. The checked-in frozen benchmark and robustness JSON files have SHA-256 2b6d6905dc527ef42ce4a902461269d8a75a72569f6c90a4d1cfeb72e7cfbb55 and cd7a1bc09616cc2a5753450dc5517f26a90b381d1e082f5f7500eab8e7798dd4, respectively.

Download the derived robustness artifact (JSON) · Return to the catalog