ETF Strategy Research and Strategy Blog: Rotation Strategies

Portfolio Builder Allocations 2018 – Set yourself up for success

First of January 2018 after a fabulous year in the markets and hopefully also your account. What better time than to spend some hours on revisiting our portfolio allocation to be ready for whatever the new year will bring? As stated previously we update and re-optimize our fixed-weight portfolios in the Portfolio Builder about twice a year. To recap, why do we re-optimize portfolios periodically? Modern Portfolio Theory by Harry Markowitz uses past returns and … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for January 2018

Logical Invest Investment Outlook January 2018 Our top 2017 investment strategies: The Maximum Yield strategy with 64.84% return. The Leveraged Universal strategy with 49.13% return. The NASDAQ 100 strategy with 28.30% return. SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned 21.70%. News: All-Strategy subscribers will be able to use QuantTrader ‘Light’ at no additional charge. Market comment: As we mentioned in our year-end review, the past year was characterized by large returns in U.S. and foreign markets and sustained low volatility despite an increase in geopolitical risk. … Read more

Logical Invest strategy update for an inflation environment

The following strategy update will be in effective for the February rebalancing. QuantTrader user will get a notice of the updated QuantTrader.ini strategy file when they start QuantTrader. You can also download the file also manually from here: https://logical-invest.com/quanttrader/QuantTrader.ini It is my opinion that going forward, inflation poses a serious risk for investors. From 1980 to 2015 Inflation went down from more than 10% to near 0%. Since 2015 inflation is steadily rising from nearly … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for February 2018

Logical Invest Investment Outlook February 2018 Our top 2018 investment strategies, year-to-date : The Leveraged Universal strategy with +8.93% return. The NASDAQ 100 strategy with +8.59% return. The U.S. sector strategy with +4.39% return. SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned +5.64%. News: QuantTrader Light is available to all subscribers, even to single strategy ones. Just download a copy and login with your LI username/password. Depending on your subscription level you will be able to access the corresponding strategies. This gives you the opportunity … Read more

ZIV/MYRS – how to go on after the crash

I have been asked in several emails on how to go on with existing ZIV positions, so here is a short note for our subscribers which still hold MYRS/ZIV positions. As you know underlying to ZIV are short positions of the VIX Futures month 4-7. So ZIV moves are about the same as the moves of the medium price of these Futures. As you can see in the above VIX term-structure chart, the medium price … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for March 2018

Logical Invest Investment Outlook March 2018 Our top 2018 investment strategies, year-to-date : The NASDAQ 100 strategy with +4.55% return. The Universal Investment strategy with +1.45% return. The Global Sector Rotation strategy with +0.58% return. SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned +1.79%. News: Strategy update: Our updated hedge now allocates to Treasuries, Gold or to a short US sector position. The hedge does not use currency ETFs anymore, which were conflicting with common 401k / IRA guidelines. Market comment: February proved to … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for April 2018

Our top 2018 investment strategies, year-to-date : The NASDAQ 100 strategy with +8.02% return. The Universal Investment strategy with +2.64% return. The Global Sector Rotation strategy with +2.01% return. SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned -1.00%. Market comment: In the beginning of March, most of our strategies allocated large amounts to TLT, the Treasury ETF. Subscribers using multiple combined strategies ended up with Treasury exposure north of 70%. This was quite difficult to digest considering the current sentiment towards rising rates. And … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for May 2018

Logical Invest Investment Outlook May 2018 Our top 2018 investment strategies, year-to-date : The NASDAQ 100 strategy with +6.49% return. The Global Sector Rotation strategy with +1.28% return The Universal Investment strategy with +1.04% return. SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned -0.48%. Market comment: Spring is coming and so is the beginning of the challenging part of the investing year. There is a reason people say “Sell in May and go away”. Historically, on average, it has been easier to make money … Read more

The Logical-Invest monthly newsletter for June 2018

Logical Invest Investment Outlook June 2018 Our top 2018 investment strategies, year-to-date : The NASDAQ 100 strategy with +9.81% return. The Universal Investment strategy with +3.15% return. The Global Sector Rotation strategy with +2.73% return SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned +1.93%. Market comment: In May we saw both U.S. equities and U.S. Treasuries rise, returning +2.43% (SPY) and +2.01% (TLT) respectively. This was partly due to investors running away from Europe and into the safety of Treasuries, as Italy is once … Read more

U.S. ETFs unavailable to European investors: PRIPPS and KID

If you are a European investor and using Interactive Brokers (U.K.) as your broker you were in for a surprise this past week: Most major U.S. ETFs like SPY, TLT, GLD are unavailable for trading to retail traders. From justETF: “The culprit is PRIIPs – a set of EU investment regulations designed to protect consumers (PRIIPs stands for Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance Products). PRIIPs require fund providers (including ETFs) to produce a Key Information … Read more