Imagine you're at a quantitative hedge fund and you're tasked with backtesting a simple momentum trading strategy based on monthly stock returns. The core idea is to long a portfolio of stocks that performed best over the past 12 months and short a portfolio of stocks that performed worst, with monthly rebalancing. Walk me through how you would design and execute this backtest, covering data preparation, defining strategy rules, risk management, performance evaluation, and potential challenges and their solutions.