ran minervini's full trend template on 171 us stocks: 11.97% cagr vs 13.20% for equal weight

i build backtesting tools, so this is from my own runs. no link, just the numbers. i wanted to know if the 8 rules add anything or if the momentum rule is doing all the work. as coded: close above sma150 and sma200, sma150 above sma200, sma200 rising vs 20 bars ago, sma50 above sma150 above sma200, close above sma50, close at least 1.3x the 52 week low, close within 25% of the 52 week high, and 126 day return in the top 30%. equal weight every qualifier, rebalance monthly, cash if nothing qualifies, 0.05% cost per side. the universe is 171 us stocks, today's large and small caps, so survivorship bias is in there and it favours the rule. scored 2017-09-15 to 2025-03-14 after a 252 day warm-up, applied to both the rule and the benchmark. template: 11.97% cagr, 35.1% max drawdown, sharpe 0.63. equal weight benchmark on the same stocks: 13.20%, 39.1%, 0.72. so about 1.2 points a year behind, with a somewhat shallower drawdown. control: rule 8 alone (top 30% by 126 day return, same dates) did 13.54%, +0.34 over the benchmark, p=0.44. also not significant. the seven extra rules didn't add anything on this sample. my first version scored from 2016 with no warm-up and showed -3.7 points a year. fixing the warm-up shrank the gap a lot, which I did not enjoy finding out. it's an in-sample backtest, and minervini trades this with discretion, stops and vcp entries that a mechanical screen doesn't capture. so it says little about how he actually trades it. for people who use the template: which discretionary part do you think does the work, the entries, the stops, or the picking before the screen?