  We establish the existence of anomalous excess returns based on trend
following strategies across four asset classes (commodities, currencies, stock
indices, bonds) and over very long time scales. We use for our studies both
futures time series, that exist since 1960, and spot time series that allow us
to go back to 1800 on commodities and indices. The overall t-stat of the excess
returns is $\approx 5$ since 1960 and $\approx 10$ since 1800, after accounting
for the overall upward drift of these markets. The effect is very stable, both
across time and asset classes. It makes the existence of trends one of the most
statistically significant anomalies in financial markets. When analyzing the
trend following signal further, we find a clear saturation effect for large
signals, suggesting that fundamentalist traders do not attempt to resist "weak
trends", but step in when their own signal becomes strong enough. Finally, we
study the performance of trend following in the recent period. We find no sign
of a statistical degradation of long trends, whereas shorter trends have
significantly withered.
