Thinking on this 4-block quant setup for the long term (30+ years). 1.27x Exposure.

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The nominal split is: **30% QQQ / 30% GDE / 20% PPA / 20% AVDV**.

The cool part here is the real effective exposure is **\~127%**. It uses GDE (Wisdomtree efficient gold), which basically holds 90% SPY and 90% gold futures using T-Bills (And stock) as collateral. So you get leverage without paying broker margin rates or risking a forced account liquidation (you'd need like an immediate -80% drop on both gold and SPY on the same day to wreck the collateral).

I backtested this from 1988 to 2025 using proxies for the newer ETFs (like AVDV and PPA, and GDE (However that one is already pre-built on testfol.io) which lacks a long track record on screen but its Small Cap methodology is similar on ETFs such as: EFV and SCZ) and for PPA just copy the underlying index.. The numbers look like this:

* **CAGR:** 14.13% (vs 11.59% for the S&P 500).
* **Max Drawdown:** \-53.61%. This is what caught my attention. While pure QQQ collapsed -83% in the dot-com crash and took almost 15 years to recover its ATH, this structure absorbed the hit and recovered in under 5 years because of the gold airbag and defense being low-beta.
* **Avg Drawdown:** \-8.75% daily vs -26.54% for QQQ. Psychologically way easier to hold.

For the support blocks, **PPA (Defense)** brings steady cash flow from long-term government contracts with massive barriers to entry. Then **AVDV** captures value and size premiums in international markets ex-US, which are less arbitrated than the US.

Even when gold dropped like 60% between 2012-2016 or during the lateral market in the 90s, the strategy kept printing steady returns since the equity engines compensate for the *contango* drag of the futures contracts.

Btw Taxes are not an issue for me since capital gains tax is 0% in my country anyway.