Buy and Hold Strategy Is Now Live on BackAlpha

Published May 7, 2025

We're excited to announce that BackAlpha now fully supports the Buy and Hold strategy — one of the most trusted and enduring investment approaches. Starting today, you can explore how a simple buy-and-hold approach would have performed across decades of market history.

Why Buy and Hold?

The Buy and Hold strategy is as straightforward as it is powerful: invest in a stock and hold it over time without trying to time the market. It reflects a belief in the long-term growth of high-quality businesses or broad indexes like the S&P 500.

Warren Buffett famously noted that most investors — including professional fund managers — fail to beat the performance of a simple, long-term investment in the S&P 500. Buy and Hold is not just a fallback strategy; it's often the benchmark that others struggle to outperform.

Buy and Hold Backtests on BackAlpha

Our Buy and Hold strategy simulation now lets you see how a single lump-sum investment in any supported stock or ETF would have grown over time — with no trading, no rebalancing, and no market timing. The simulation assumes a one-time purchase on the starting date, followed by continuous holding until the end of the selected period.

For each asset, we show key metrics such as:

Annualized return — calculated based on the growth of your initial investment
Maximum drawdown — the deepest historical drop from peak to trough during the holding period
Starting and ending prices — adjusted for splits and dividends, to reflect total return
Growth trajectory — a normalized monthly price chart showing how the asset performed over time
Calmar Ratio — a measure of return versus risk, derived from annualized return and max drawdown

Explore Different Time Horizons

Want to see how Buy and Hold would have worked over a short or long horizon? You can view performance for 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 years — or even go back to the earliest available trading data. This flexibility makes it easy to compare past bull and bear markets.

Start exploring Buy and Hold now by visiting the Buy and Hold strategy page. Whether you're analyzing SPY, AAPL, or any other ticker, BackAlpha gives you the data to test your conviction.