Tag Archives: Pairs Trading

The 3 “Best” Stock Pairs to Trade — That All Lose Money (Tested)

September 20, 2026 11:32 am |
famous stock pairs to trade backtest — KO/PEP, MA/V, TGT/WMT losses vs HGV/MGM winnerFive-year backtest, identical settings: the three textbook pairs all lost; HGV/MGM went nine for nine.

Ask anyone which stock pairs to trade and you’ll hear the same three names: Coke and Pepsi. Visa and Mastercard. Target and Walmart. They’re in every textbook, every YouTube video, every forum thread. Famous companies, obvious rivals, surely perfect pairs.

I ran all three through a five-year backtest last week. Every one of them lost money.

This isn’t a trick. Same settings for every test, disclosed in full below, straight out of our software. And the punchline isn’t that pairs trading doesn’t work.

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Pairs Trading Example: The Vegas Pair That Kept Paying for 5 Years

September 13, 2026 1:35 pm |

Want a real pairs trading example instead of theory? Here’s one straight from our platform: Hilton Grand Vacations (HGV) and MGM Resorts (MGM). Two Las Vegas-rooted leisure stocks. One quietly reliable trading relationship.

The numbers: 12 trades, 12 winners

We ran a 5-year end-of-day backtest at $5,000 per leg. The results speak plainly:

  • 12 completed trades — every one profitable
  • Net profit: $3,122 after $258 in commissions
  • Average profit per trade: $260
  • Maximum drawdown: just 4.02%

The equity curve is a staircase, not a rollercoaster.

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Market-Neutral Pair Trading in Action: May 2026 Top 50 USA Stock Pair Stars

May 11, 2026 4:52 pm |
market-neutral pair trading

Most retail trading strategies depend on direction — and direction is the one thing nobody can predict consistently. By contrast, market-neutral pair trading offers an alternative: trades constructed not on whether a market rises or falls, but on the relationship between two fundamentally related assets. As a result, when that relationship temporarily diverges, mean reversion offers a measurable, repeatable edge.

Your Shortcut to Market-Neutral Pair Trading Success

This May, after another quarter of research, recalibration, and statistical validation, we are releasing the May 2026 Vintage of our Top 50 USA Stock Pair Stars.

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Pair Trading Strategy Enhancement

April 10, 2026 12:11 pm |
Go Hybrid: Mean-Reversion Framework PLUS Technical Bias Filtering pair trading strategy enhancement

Pairs trading remains one of the most widely used market-neutral strategies, built on the principle of exploiting mean reversion in a spread constructed from two related assets. However, traditional implementations—typically based on cointegration tests and z-score entry/exit thresholds—face well-documented limitations, including instability across regimes and declining profitability in modern markets (Tenyakov & Mamon, 2017). So in this blog post we suggest our own pair trading strategy enhancement: combine cointegration and z-score based trading signals with refined technical trading indicators to create a Relative Edge indicator.

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Kalman Filters vs. PairTrade Finder®

March 26, 2026 3:38 pm |
Why We Keep It Simple (On Purpose) Kalman filters

From time to time, experienced traders reach out and ask:

“Why doesn’t PairTrade Finder® use a Kalman filter to calculate dynamic hedge ratios?”

It’s a fair question. Kalman filters are widely used in quantitative finance and are often presented as a more advanced way to trade pairs.

So this post explains our thinking clearly.

PairTrade Finder® is designed to capture most of the statistical edge—without the complexity that often reduces real-world performance.

In practice, as a rule we seek to target a platform that delivers 80% of the benefit of institutional grade models with around 20% of the complexity.

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Learn to Trade Stock Pairs: Monday Morning Thoughts for Inspiration

July 1, 2019 5:43 pm |

Exhaustive and robust academic research of stock pair trading strategies on the S&P 500 show consistent trading gains.  Stock pair trading, especially using cointegration for selecting pairs, has shown historic profitability of up to 5% per month.  Learn to trade stock pairs in our 30 Minute Webinar.  Sign up for a 15-Day Free Trial and get our eBook Trade Like a Hedge Fund for free.

Learn to Trade Stock Pairs Today!

Free triallers also receive access to our Pair Trading Video Training Course.  Taught by a professional pair trader, this series presents pair trading in simple, easily accessible terms. 

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