The worst result on this site happened on a stock that would have made money held

Boeing's result under 52 week low reversion is negative 75.09 percent. Check every per-ticker return across every one of Tenachine's 22 published studies and nothing else comes in lower. It is the single worst result on the site. Buying and holding Boeing over the same window, the identical ten years, returned positive 55.73 percent. The strategy did not just underperform holding the stock. It turned a stock that would have made money into the worst loss this site has recorded.

How six trades produced the worst number on the site

52 week low reversion buys a stock after it makes a new 52-week low, betting on a bounce. On Boeing, that trigger fired six times over the decade. Two of the six trades closed positive. The other four closed negative, a 33.33 percent win rate, and the worst of the four losing trades alone cost negative 69.21 percent. The average trade across all six, negative 20.73 percent, is deep enough that a small number of trades did not need to be unlucky in the usual sense, betting on a bounce that kept not arriving during a stretch when Boeing's underlying business was taking real, prolonged damage was enough on its own.

The dollar figures behind the strategy's profit factor make the shape of the six trades concrete. Total gross profit across the two winning trades: 3,322.98 dollars. Total gross loss across the four losing trades: 78,410.02 dollars, a profit factor of 0.0973. Tenachine's guide on reading a profit factor near zero covers the opposite extreme, a ratio capped at 999 by a division quirk. This is the other tail: a ratio this close to zero on a real, populated sample means the losses were not just more frequent than the wins, they were more than twenty times larger in total dollar terms.

What buy and hold does not explain about the gap

Tenachine's guide comparing golden cross to buy and hold on NVDA, TSLA, and AMD already covers the more common version of this gap, a trend-following rule missing most of a stock's run because it enters late and exits early. Boeing's case is not that. A mean-reversion rule that buys new lows is built to sometimes catch a falling knife, and the strategy's own aggregate numbers, a 64.7 percent win rate and a positive 21.25 percent average return across 214 completed tickers, show it usually does not end this badly. Boeing is the tail case: a stock whose new lows kept being followed by lower lows for long enough that six straight attempts to catch the bottom mostly failed, on a name that then went on to recover enough that simply holding it beat every one of those six trades combined.

This is not a claim that 52 week low reversion is a bad strategy, or that Boeing was a bad stock to hold. A 6-trade sample on one ticker is exactly the kind of small, thin base that can produce an outlier in either direction, a point Tenachine's guide on the site's own Kelly criterion figures makes about a 14-trade investor record instead of a 6-trade backtest, the same underlying caution moved to a different kind of data. What the pairing does show plainly is that a strategy's return and a stock's own return are two separate numbers, and neither one is a stand-in for the other. Past performance does not predict future results, on either side of this comparison, and the worst number on this site is a fact about six specific trades on one specific stock over one specific decade, not a verdict on the rule that produced them.