Predicting the future returns of most investments is extremely difficult over long periods of time because fund leadership changes, the market has new opportunities, new products are developed, and investor desires change. For the most part investors are correct that future returns are difficult if not impossible to predict.

However, it is possible to have more predictable future returns if you do the same thing over and over. The Stars buy and hold strategy does the same thing over and over in several ways.

A buy and hold strategy eliminates the need to call market direction because you never sell out of fear of a market correction.

Cap weighted ETFs can pick the stocks much better than a human. They buy what is rising and sell what is falling. They buy more of what is constantly rising the most. The stock selection process is always the same.

Rebalancing a volatile ETF against a less volatile ETF allows returns in up and down markets to be similar if you consider a correction to include the two years after the correction low. The average return of those 3 years is roughly equal the average return in a rising market.

Looking at 125 years of history we see that the market goes through consolidation periods followed by rising periods. We do not see periods of sustained downward moves for 10-25 years. Corrections happen rapidly.

In the last 25 years we have seen a pretty good sampling of the future. In that period the Stars model doubled the performance of the S&P on average every year. The actual outperformance varied between 8 and 27 percentage points per year above the S&P depending on market type.