Vol. III · No. 22Friday, May 29, 2026Independent · Reader-funded
Est. 2024 · A Quarterly on Capital & Conduct

Coin & Compass

A journal of money, markets, and the math nobody teaches you in school.
← Back to The Ledger
Markets

Sector Rotation Is Mostly a Myth

The story is clean. The data is not. Most sector-rotation strategies underperform a boring total-market index after costs.

By Aris Demir · April 21, 2026 · 10 min read

Academic studies of momentum-based sector rotation show alpha in backtests that mysteriously vanishes out of sample. Survivorship bias, look-ahead bias, and transaction costs eat the rest.

The honest reason to overweight a sector is structural conviction held for a decade, not a chart pattern from last quarter.