Performance Update: June 2026
See how a simple ETF strategy is quietly outperforming the market by 13.59% in 2026 YTD in a month-by-month review.
Every month I send out a performance update for The MarketFighter Strategy: The investment approach I have followed for the past five years, which I’m sharing in this newsletter. It’s a strategy that beat the market in 25 of the past 26 years.
In this post, I will give you a transparent look into how the strategy performed in May and how far we are ahead of the market in 2026 so far.
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In May we extended the gap
The last two months have been a joy for most investors. Especially for those invested in broad market indices or in AI/semiconductor-related stocks… or in the MarketFighter Strategy.
After slightly lagging the MSCI World Index in April, we were back to outperforming in May, having done this in 4 of the 5 months of 2026 so far. This chart compares the returns of the strategy with the world index (market) month by month:
To be fair, the performance of a long-term strategy like this should be measured in years and decades, not in months. Still it’s great to see that it continues the historical consistency and outperformance in 2026 so far.
The strategy stands on two legs:
Relative factor momentum
Relative sector momentum
In May, the sector pick (Energy) underperformed significantly. But because we combine two simple strategies into one, we didn’t experience a loss:
The outperformance of the factor pick (US Value) was even more significant. So much that by combining the two investments, we outperformed our market benchmark. This robustness comes from combining two strategies that don’t follow the same patterns.
Some of you have asked me why I didn’t combine with even more separate strategies. The truth is, I like to keep things simple, trying to get as big and stable returns as possible from as little effort as possible.
You could definitely add more legs or substrategies to the system, but it could very well lower the returns and it would in any case involve more trades and more effort.
The monthly breakdown
In the table below I have provided the exact performance of our strategy on a monthly basis compared to the market (the MSCI World Index), as well as the alpha (the difference between our return and the market return):
The table also shows the allocation in each month. These are the two ETFs the system decided to allocate money into based on the relative price momentum rules that are the foundation of the strategy.
Unlike the general market, we have yet to see our first negative month in 2026, and we extended our excess return to 13.59% above the world index. These numbers are all before taxes and trading fees and measured in EUR. They will not differ much in USD as the fluctuations between the two have been small in 2026 so far.
We can of course not expect a full year of only positive months. No strategy is guaranteed to do well in any time frame, and every year has had good and bad periods. But personally, I have a lot of confidence based on the historical track record of this strategy. From what we know so far, it seems we are heading for another strong year of outperformance.
➡️ See this article for the full return overview of each year
You can read more about the full investment universe and the 15 indices and corresponding ETFs the strategy uses here:
➡️ Indices and ETFs in our investment universe
If you’re looking for the June trading signal and curious about which ETFs the strategy is currently allocated to, I wrote a separate article here:
➡️ The June 2026 Trading Signal
A personal note
When I developed this strategy and started trading it in early 2021, I had a feeling it would either turn out to be a beautiful illusion or it would be life-changing. Today, I can look back and confirm it was the latter.
As a result of my returns from the strategy, I was able to leave my 9-to-5 job one month ago to work with my passions for investing and building on my own, and to share my strategy with all of you in this newsletter.
New people are joining every day, and I’m grateful to experience the engagement and the interest with which my approach is being received. Hard work, consistency and discipline pays off — in life and in investing.
Thank you all!
Disclaimer: The MarketFighter Strategy is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not financial advice, and the author is not a licensed investment advisor. Investing in ETFs involves significant risk, and past performance is never a guarantee of future results. You are solely responsible for your own trades and financial outcomes. Read the full Disclaimer here.
Can you please add your strategy’s comparative returns to SPY in these monthly performance updates alongside MSCI World, to humor those of us who think that past 15 years of rolling outperformance of the former over the latter, combined with the US market’s leadership relative to technology for the foreseeable future, makes SPY set-and-forget the more formidable competitor to your strategy?
I really need to take some time to go through your stuff - from what I’ve seen it looks like it’s worth a proper deep dive. I’m on holiday next week so I’ll do it then. Hope you enjoy being read on a beach in Sicily!