Market-neutral strategies

We document a persistent intramonth momentum cycle in U.S. sector ETFs that yields meaningful risk-adjusted returns when properly sequenced. Using the nine original Select Sector SPDR ETFs and SPY as the market benchmark from December 1998 through June 2026, we show that trailing 252-day sector momentum generates a positive spread on the first trading day of the month—and then sharply reverses on days two and three. A third, independent leg of the cycle emerges in the window from ten to five trading days before month-end, consistent with the intramonth momentum cycle recently documented at the single-stock level by Nathan, Suominen and Tasa (2026). Stitching the three legs together into a single composite strategy delivers 5.99% annualized return at a 0.55 Sharpe ratio for the long-short variant, and 3.77% at 0.54 for the market-neutral variant—all while being invested fewer than half the trading days each month. Our contribution is twofold: we extend the calendar-anomaly literature from individual equities to sector-level portfolios, and we provide practitioners with a transparent, low-turnover framework that translates these academic patterns into actionable trade schedules.