The original Jegadeesh and Titman momentum paper (pdf) used a “skip month” to manage the reversal effect (quant.stackexchange). However, why is it one month and not two, or three or four?
Here’s what the equity curves of different skip month configs look like.
The “skip one month” is indeed a magical config. Also, if you are optimizing for Sharpe, skip two.
Code and charts on github.