Offense Also Wins Championships

There’s a common saying in sports: Defense wins championships. The 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans showed truth in that statement, but it’d be foolish to stop there and totally discount the role of the offense in that game as well.

For those familiar with tactical, systematic, or trend-following investment strategies, it’s well understood that these approaches tend to emphasize defense. “Win more by losing less,” is a mantra ingrained in the DNA of trend followers.

But sometimes, is the best way to win more…by winning more?

Fly, Eagles, Fly

The National Football League’s top-ranked defense, the Philadelphia Eagles, dominated the two-time defending Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, in the February matchup. Chiefs Quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked six times and pressured on nearly every possession, as the Eagles built an insurmountable lead and cruised to victory.

That said, let’s not discount the Eagles offense. Of the 40 points the Eagles put on the board, 34 came from the offensive unit. The offense ranked in the top 10 during the regular season and led the league in rushing thanks to their reverse-hurdling running back Saquon Barkley.

Clearly, offense matters too.

Not All Asset Management Defensive Approaches Are Equal

In asset management, a strong defense means reducing exposure to weakening assets and reallocating to historically safer positions, such as cash or fixed income.

But what happens next? Too often, that part is an afterthought. At Blueprint Investment Partners, it’s not.

Our systematic investing approach identifies stronger assets with similar characteristics to those we’ve exited, aiming to keep compounding rates as high as possible for as long as we can. It doesn’t always lead to an immediate boost in returns, but over time, our research shows it delivers significant outperformance, all else equal.

Take the 2024 dominance of U.S. stocks over their international counterparts as an example. In October 2024, Torsten Sløk of Apollo noted that the U.S. share of global market cap was at its highest level in at least two decades. Zooming out, this was the longest stretch of U.S. equity outperformance since the 1970s.

Investors with a static allocation to international stocks, or even those using a tactical approach that simply moves to cash or fixed income during periods of underperformance, missed a massive offensive opportunity.

At Blueprint Investment Partners, when international equities weaken, we first look to U.S. stocks as a potential destination before considering a more traditionally defensive move. We only return to international markets when global equities regain enough strength to justify the diversification tradeoff. According to our research, this approach has led to meaningful outperformance compared to defaulting to cash or bonds in these situations.

Offensive Moves with Trend Following

We apply the same philosophy within asset classes:

• In U.S. equities, this might mean favoring growth over value, tech over other sectors, or large-cap over small- and mid-cap stocks, depending on the trends.
• In fixed income, trend signals help dictate allocations across the yield curve and among different instruments — whether municipal, inflation-protected, or international bonds.
• For more adventurous financial advisors, we can even incorporate leverage in responsible ways to boost expected returns in favorable environments.

These are all offensive plays.

Adaptability On Both Sides of the Ball

One final thought before we wrap this up: The beauty of systematic investing strategies is their adaptability. When leadership shifts between assets, we don’t need to predict it, we just follow the data.

Case in point: After years of U.S. dominance, international equities have begun to outperform. For those trying to call market tops and bottoms, this might seem counterintuitive. For us, it’s no problem. We simply follow our process.

We think trend-following strategies will always be valued for their defensive strengths, which help investors stay on course through volatile markets. But the longer we apply this discipline, the more we’ve come to appreciate its offensive capabilities as well. Whether it’s capitalizing on dislocations between and within asset classes or even using leverage, we believe the strengths of trend following offer many benefits for financial advisors looking to grow their business and keep their clients on track.