
This guide describes in detail each of the investment systems available to you through GoldBuzz INSIDER. Each system page follows the same structure: how the system approaches its market, its historical performance, its investment profile, and what you should realistically expect as a subscriber.
Before diving in, here's a quick explanation of the key terms you'll see throughout.
Every market has two systems. The Max Return system is designed to capture as many profitable opportunities as possible. It's more active, spends more time invested, and aims to maximise your total return over time. The trade-off is more frequent investments and the occasional false start.
The Min Risk system takes the opposite approach. It's highly selective, often sitting in cash for extended periods, and only invests when conditions are strongly favourable. It typically produces lower total returns than Max Return, but with significantly smaller losses during downturns. Your capital spends more time safely on the sidelines.
Neither approach is better in absolute terms - it depends on your temperament and goals. Max Return should make a higher return over time, and should outperform just buying and holding. Min Risk may achieve a profit performance similar to buying and holding but with much less volatility. Many subscribers follow both systems for a given market and allocate between them based on their own risk tolerance.
You’ll find detailed data on drawdowns and other risk metrics on the individual system pages.
CAGR stands for Compound Annual Growth Rate. It's the average yearly return your investment would have earned over the entire period, accounting for compounding. If a system shows a CAGR of 12%, it means that $1,000 invested at the start would have grown as if it earned 12% every year, with each year's gains reinvested.
We show this alongside buy-and-hold's CAGR so you can see whether the system outperformed simply owning the asset and doing nothing (buy and hold).
This is one of the most important numbers in this guide. Standard CAGR treats the entire period equally, whether the system was invested or sitting in cash. But if a system is only in the market 30% of the time, the days it is invested are working much harder than the headline number suggests.
Exposure-Adjusted CAGR measures the return per unit of time actually invested. Think of it this way: if two systems both return 10% per year, but one is invested all year and the other achieves the same return while only being in the market for four months, the second system is using your capital three times more efficiently. The remaining eight months, your money is in cash and available for other uses - or simply not at risk.
For buy-and-hold, the exposure-adjusted CAGR is the same as the standard CAGR, since you're invested 100% of the time.
A drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough decline - the biggest drop from a high point to a subsequent low point. If an investment rises to $10,000 and then falls to $6,000 before recovering, that's a 40% drawdown.
This is arguably the most important risk measure because it tells you the worst pain you would have experienced. A system with a 25% worst drawdown feels fundamentally different to live through than one with a 75% worst drawdown, even if their long-term returns are similar. We compare each system's worst drawdown against buy-and-hold's worst drawdown so you can see how much pain the system avoided.
Each system page includes four numbers that describe how the system behaves day-to-day:
Time in Market is the percentage of days the system is invested rather than sitting in cash. A system with 30% time in market is in cash more often than not. A system with 80% is almost always invested.
Trades per Year tells you how often the system changes its signal. A system with 10 trades per year is giving you a new signal almost every month. A system with 1 trade per year might hold the same position for the entire year.
Average Trade Duration is how long a typical position lasts before the system exits.
Longest Idle Period is the maximum number of consecutive days the system spent in cash. This is important for setting expectations - if a system's longest idle period is two years, you need to be comfortable sitting on the sidelines for that long.
The systems have been designed using large amounts of historical data, going back as far as reliable data is available. In every case, hundreds of thousands of methodologies were built and tested on unseen data to establish their validity.
Heatmaps were then used to find the most statistically significant areas that are predictive of future price movement on unseen data.
All performance figures in this guide are based on historical testing - applying each system's live rules to actual market data. The testing periods differ by market: gold and silver data extends back to 2001, gold and silver miners to 2010 and 2014 respectively, and Bitcoin to 2018.
Markets change, and past patterns may not repeat exactly. However, these systems have been designed to capture fundamental market dynamics - momentum, trend, and cycle patterns - that have persisted across decades and across very different market environments. The long testing periods give us confidence that the systems are robust and the live system has been in use for over a year with beta testers and while I have been using it myself.
Now it’s time to check out each of your individual models, so you know what to expect from each one and choose which ones work best for your requirements.