Portfolio Optimization

Enhancement of the Treasury hedge in our strategies

Hedge

For many years, most of our strategies used long term Treasuries (TLT, TMF) as a hedge against market corrections. These Treasuries have been a safe haven asset with negative correlation to the stock market and have been used successfully to reduce the risk/volatility of our strategies. With rising rates and inflation, long term treasuries lose a part of their value as a safe haven asset. Their hedging value depends mainly on the speed interest rates … Read more

QuantTrader – The Swiss army tool now also for individual investors

QuantTrader

Dear Subscribers, We are happy to announce that the full QuantTrader version is now available to individual investors for $150 a month or $1500 per year. We will cross-subsidize a bit with the high interest we´ve received from institutional investors like RIA and hedge-fund managers so far. Fair play requires that subscribers who manage their own or other people’s assets above $1m subscribe to the institutional offering. QuantTrader is a fine piece of art mixed with a … Read more

Easy Investing in a multi-strategy Markowitz optimized Portfolio

Design and Execute your Custom Markowitz optimized ETF Portfolio

In our recent post we´ve shared some powerful options to design a well-balanced portfolio of several Logical Invest strategies to achieve a preset portfolio objective using Modern portfolio theory (MPT) techniques developed by Nobel Prize laureate Harry Markowitz. Here, we review the steps to achieving an optimized portfolio with our tools and summarize some portfolio options to illustrate use of our updated tool set: (picture for mobile use) These options might serve as a starting point to design your … Read more

Correlation – Still the grand lady of Portfolio Diversification

MaxCagr Vol

It has been now 18 months since our post on “The power of diversification: Portfolios of Logical Invest Strategies”. Back then our main argument for diversification using a robust portfolio of several of our strategies was that “diversification is ‘a rare free lunch’, it is well accepted part of modern financial portfolios, and to stay financially healthy it is important not to skip lunch”.

Several new strategies have been published since then, among them the “NASDAQ 100” strategy, the “Gold-Currency” strategy and our “Hell on Fire”, the 3x leveraged Universal Investment strategy. At the same time, we went through the bumpy start into 2016 and most recently the waves created by the BREXIT referendum.

Does our stated hypothesis of formerly presented portfolios still hold true? How have the individual components performed, and most importantly, have they added value through low correlation? Have new optimum portfolios emerged since then?

Invest in VIX volatility using ZIV

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Update January 2017: The recent performance of investing in volatility can be seen here. You are probably wondering how we could achieve yearly performances of more than 50% with some of our rotation strategies. The reason is that the Maximum Yield Rotation Strategy and the Global Market Rotation Enhanced Strategy are investing in inverse volatility. Invest in inverse Volatility So, here are now some facts to show you why I like inverse volatility so much. … Read more

The NASDAQ 100 Meta-Strategy – Stock Selection and Compact Meta-Strategy

NasdaqstrategyetfrotationkIRAretirementaccount

Intelligent Algorithms run two prallel sub-strategies.
Meta- layer chooses between the two sub-strategies based on current market conditions.
Variable allocation to Treasuries provides protection from large drawdowns.

This strategy is a good fit for investors that want to invest intelligently in the U.S. equity market as well as for stock-pickers looking for a rules-based growth strategy.
The strategy can also complement our existing strategies and can work well with our more conservative strategies like BRS (bond rotation), the BUG or with non-U.S. equity strategies like World Top 4.

Build Custom ETF Portfolios: Mid Year Review Portfolio Builder

Portfolios

For our „All Strategies“ Subscriber who use the Portfolio Builder to blend their own mix of Logical Invest Strategies, here some updates and a short mid-year review:

We have now included the “World Top 4 Strategy” into both the online an offline tool. To keep the charts readable, we opted for replacing the Aggressive Version of our “Global Sector Rotation”.
The preconfigured and optimized Markowitz Portfolios have been updated, only slight changes in the allocations occurred – all are <5%, so in most cases these can be neglected due to account size.

Logical-Invest review @ Daily Fintech

DailyFintech

With a lot of hype about FinTech these days, we´re happy to have received a positive review from one of the most important FinTech blogs. What is FinTech? Here the definition of FinTech by Investopedia: Fintech is a portmanteau of financial technology that describes an emerging financial services sector in the 21st century. Originally, the term applied to technology applied to the back-end of established consumer and trade financial institutions. A review of Logical Invest by … Read more

Logical Invest at the Silicon Valley chapter of the investors AAII

InvestorsAAIIkIRAretirementsavingsrotation

What an audience and what an experience! Thanks to the investors AAII Silicon Valley! As announced some weeks ago, on April 11 we hosted our first conference at the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Association of Individual Investors AAII in San Jose, CA. Sharing and discussing some of the topics which are close to our heart with an incredible audience in live mode was such a great opportunity we completely overran the anticipated schedule … Read more

‘Hell on Fire’: The 3x leveraged Universal Investment Strategy

leveraged universal investment Strategy

Summary:
-Aggressive leveraged version of our previously published Universal Investment Strategy
-Variable SPY-TLT allocations dynamically adapted to the market conditions.
-45% annual return with a Sharpe Ratio of 1.3 since 2002.

Due to its simplicity and low correlation to the S&P 500, there is a continued interest in the UIS version that uses 3x leveraged ETFs: ETF SPXL (Direxion Daily S&P 500 Bull 3X Shares ETF) and TMF (Direxion Daily 30-Year Treasury Bull 3x Shares ETF). Following the suggested nomenclature by Al from AAII SV – and to honor their interest, we call this version “Hell on fire”, which alludes to the high risk/return profile of the strategy. We will show ways to blend this strategy in a well-balanced and risk-optimized portfolio as to overcome the generally negative perception of private investors towards leveraged ETF.