Getting started with our Strategies.

When setting up your investments there are several considerations you need to keep in mind. Depending on your answers to these questions different capital allocations and ETF investment strategies would best fit your needs.

Funds available in your retirement savings may be subject to restrictions in the choice of investments compared other funds. And your risk aversion will also be different.

Do you plan to invest a fixed amount, or monthly allocations?

Our investment strategies are often medium-term, which means you should be able to stick to a chosen strategy to let it accumulate. As you manage the funds you can always withdraw money, but experience shows that necessity comes typically in the worst moments.

While higher returns do not necessarily mean higher risk taking, the worst enemy to your long-term results is how you react to volatility.

If you choose a portfolio mix which is too aggressive for you, you will tend to make changes to it at the worst possible times.

Select your profile to take you to more insights on how to proceed:
New to self-managed investments?

Need a hand to get started?

Here is how you can setup your account and portfolio

Welcome to this fascinating world of investing.

Here a short checklist of what you need to get started with our ETF investment Strategies:

Decide on the amount you are looking for to invest. Segregate your retirement savings from the other savings you can decide more freely on. Why the segregation?

Often in your retirement savings you will be more restricted in the choice of investments. In the U.S. you might be locked into an 401k with only limited options to choose from, or outside the US you might not even be able to decide how you would like your money to be invested in. IRAs in the U.S. trading accounts have more flexibility. There are some solutions known to us at least in Germany, Greece, and Mexico – we will shortly post some of our ideas and proposals in a blog.

Also, your risk aversion most probably will be different for your retirement savings compared to your other saving pots. So while you might be striving for a 10% performance / volatility mix in your savings, you might be willing to take some more bumps for a higher double-digit return in other savings.

As our ETF investment Strategies use widely held ETFs you will that they work sell in both types of savings accounts. If not, you might be able to find suitable alternatives offered by your pension fund here or here. For our European investors you might start here.

Have a look at our ETF investment Strategies and find your portfolio mix matching your risk style. We suggest some strategies and their portfolio weighting further down this section.

To execute our orders of our ETF investment Strategies, you will need a broker or bank. To keep your expenses low we suggests that you get an account with a low cost online broker. You can execute our trades for about $1 per 100 shares.

A good list to get you started in the United States can be found here.

For our European, Latin American and other subscribers there are more restrictions. Many of your local banks will have rather high fees and commissions, and the choice of instruments to invest in might be limited. For example fees for an order for 100 shares in the US might be around $1 while the same order at most European banks and brokers might be around EUR 30 or even more. Also, typically the spreads, (i.e. difference between ask and offer price) outside the very liquid US exchanges is often higher. Why is this important?

Monthly rotational ETF investment Strategies like the one we use require typically 6-12 switches per year. So fees and spreads might add quickly up quickly if you use a high cost broker, and this money is better in your pocket.

We have good experience – albeit no commercial relationship – working with Interactive Brokers (IB), their accounts can be based in any major currencies and offer almost all markets to you. IB might be a good alternative for customers based outside the US.

Look for the investment solution which best fits your need:

A single pick of our ETF investment Strategies to complement your existing portfolio?
A Complete Portfolio from our ETF investment Strategies for your savings of retirement account
Building your own set of strategies into a custom made portfolio using our software QuantTrader?
Or the convenienve of getting your custom tailoref portfolio managed by our Partner The Estate Planners Group?

Rebalance your portfolio periodically to keep the allocations within the targets

Once you subscribe to our ETF investment Strategies, we will send you monthly (or more often depending on the strategy) a newsletter with the buy and sell signals of the strategies you subscribed to. We recommend you to execute these orders at your broker the next morning; this should be doable online within 15-20 minutes. Submitting your order some 2-3 days later is also OK for the strategies we use, you might only see the “turn of the month effect” to be reduced and “out-of-sync” with our reports.

Check our site frequently for news and updates to our ETF investment Strategies and additional blogs. Additionally to reviewing your broker account, you can also track the performance of your strategies as we update our database daily.

Our Custom Portfolio Builder might be a good start for you to create your portfolio. Here some articles you will enjoy reading:

For further hints and discussion please use this topic at our forum, where you will find other people looking to get started with us.

Experienced managing your investments?

Then there is no need to bother you with the basics.

We will get you quickly started using Logical-Invest.

Also to you first of all a warm Welcome, Gruezi, Willkommen, Bienvenido and Καλώς Ήρθες!

You probably need less advice than our newbies, but you may find some useful information also in the upper section. Please see here a short list of the main sections of interest for you to get started:

Have a look at the individual performance pages of our strategies

Our Portfolio Builder to customize your individual blend of our strategies

Our whitepapers with even more details on the underlying rationale

Our subscription offers

The forum for searching more answers, or raising questions

Also have a look at our Custom Portfolio Builder where you can weight our ETF investment Strategies and mix them with other proxy assets for a well balanced portfolio. Some examples to raise your eyebrows. Here a 3 minute video which showcasts the main features:

For further discussion on portfolio mixes please have a look at this dedicated thread on potential portfolio compositions at the forum.

Quant like us?

Here’s what you need in 90 seconds

Geeky feels warm and fuzzy to us..

Also to you first of all a warm Welcome, Gruezi, Willkommen, Bienvenido and Καλώς Ήρθες!

Here a short list of the main sections of interest for you to get started:

Detailed background and performance stats of our strategies

Our whitepapers with even more details on the underlying rationale

Our subscription offers

The forum for searching more answers, or raising questions

A dedicated thread with more technical details, facts and discussion at our Forum

Looking for some super charged portfolios of our ETF investment Strategies to boost your trading? Have a look at these:

As a quant or researcher, here are some other areas of interest:

Our research and trading platforms include Quantshare which is script and C# based software, Python, Matlab and Amibroker. As well as our proprietary Development QuantTrader, which we developed using C#.
For the analysis we mostly use Yahoo Finance dividend and split adjusted data. Since our strategies are not intra-day, the dividend adjusted data and accuracy works well as it captures the value of dividend payments.
There is a vibrant discussion on some of Franks’ articles at SeekingAlpha.com. We feel encouraged by the feedback and interest, and enjoy the quant community getting inspired by replicating some of the strategies.
One of our main reserach topics is about what we call a “meta-strategy” approach, e.g. a strategy-of-strategies layer on top of our individual ETF investment Strategies and other asset classes. This layer employs a set of features like mean-variance and minimum-variance optimization, David Varadi’s minimum-correlation algorithm, but also simple performance, volatility or trading-the-equity-line approaches to further stabilize the performance and risk characteristics of portfolios. In addition, we are expanding our efforts in finding better hedges to our existing strategies.

All this is in constant development, and we enjoy exchanging our experiences and results with the quant community.