Dear all, I changed the introductory text in the assignment slightly to avoid confusion.
``In this assignment, you will analyze data over two periods. There is an in-sample period of 41 years from 1975 to 2015 (analyzed in Questions 1 to 7). There is also a holdout sample period of 9 years from 2016 to 2024 (analyzed in Questions 8 to 11). The holdout sample is used to test whether the performance of investment strategies that are optimized over the in-sample period extends out-of-sample. This method of backtesting is popular in the industry to determine the usefulness of optimization methods in a real-time setting.''
Best, Martijn