abstract
- During COVID-19 pandemic, the financial market experienced an increase in its volatility, making it riskier for most investors. Although many conservative financial experts advise against trading, some investors trade using mathematical prediction models in an attempt to beat the market. A very popular forecasting model is the simple moving average (SMA). This paper intends to answer two main questions. The first one is whether using the SMA to determine when to sell and buy stock over an extended period of time brings overall positive returns to the investor. The second question would be: Is this method better than the buy and hold strategy? Which one brings the optimal returns? A computational implementation of the SMA is proposed to answer these questions by running a back-testing simulation of an investor using SMA against an investor using the buy and hold method. This simulation runs from February 2020 through March 2022, and it is constrained by only taking into account the companies that performed best and worst on the S &P 500 index the two previous years (2018¿2020). © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.