Whew. It's been too long since my last post here. Happy New Year, all!
I've been using historical data with the S&P 500, the Wilshire 4500 and MSCI EAFE. After seeing how this spreadsheet would've worked through all those years, with its variety of markets, I practically revamped the way I was going through the logic. It was too quick to leave the market.
Since this is a long-term account, I made sure that I would stay in the market more often. It seems it is more risky to get out of the market than to just stay in.
For the backtesting, I have S&P data starting in January 1950, Wilshire data starting January 1987, MSCI EAFE data starting May 2001, G fund and F fund data starting in June 2003.
From January 1950 to December 28, 2006:
S&P 500 : 8451.8%
Monkey: 54202.74%
The monkey for more recent years:
2006: 41.32%
2005: 18.81%
2004: 28.23%
2003: 33.89%
2002: 3.967%
2001: 12.57%
2000: -13.31%
Any time frame up until June 2003, every time the Monkey got out of the market, it got 0% gain because I did not have G fund and F fund data from before then. So it is possible that the Monkey would've done better in some down years if the F fund was available as an option.
Right now, the spreadsheet is HUGE (71.8MB). I'm currently in a Visual Basic class with college. Maybe by the end of the class, I can turn this into a standalone program instead of wasting hard drive space with a spreadsheet that repeats the same IF, THEN, ELSE statements thousands upon thousands of times.