As you perhaps know I have invested all my money in my own strategies, and I and my family (the best wife of all and 4 nice children) are living from the return of these investments. So, I just cannot afford to lose much money in market corrections. Therefore I always try to improve the strategies to lower the risk of major losses through hedging. Timed Hedging The new “Timed hedging” is a major improvement … Read more
A hedge is always an investment which is negatively correlated to the main investment. When the main investment goes down, the hedge should go up and if the main investment goes up, then the hedge normally goes down. It is clear, that we like the first, which is to reduce the draw downs with a hedge, but not to reduce the gains. If you have a stock portfolio, then the main hedge possibilities are: A … Read more
TMF is by far not so good as TMV short for hedging portfolio. Here is the 12 month comparison. While all treasuries had quite big losses of about -7%, a shortTMV position was flat over the year. I think for IRA accounts the better and saver way of hedging would be a part of the investment in the Bond rotation. This one should make 10-15% per year and is also good for hedging portfolio. Hedging … Read more
This monthly premium of being short volatility is the only thing which makes the ZIV price go up. Unfortunately there is a second quite strong influence on the ZIV price. This is the market volatility (VIX). In the chart below you see the green VIX chart. Every spike corresponds to a fear spike of the investors. During such spikes we also have smaller market corrections. During these market corrections ZIV is going down, because the … Read more
Update: You can see the most recent performance our our inverse volatility strategy here. Consult vixcentral for the daily VIC term curve. In this paper, I present five different strategies you can use to trade inverse volatility. Why trade inverse volatility you ask? Because since 2011, trading inverse volatility was probably the most rewarding investment an investor could make in the markets. Annual returns of between 40% – 100% have been possible which crushes any other … Read more
Introduction to the SPY-TLT Universal Investment Strategy (UIS) This paper discusses the simple but effective method of using adaptive allocations between stock market ETFs and Treasuries to assemble a simple yet smart Investment Strategy. This method has been developed to replace the 100% switching used in normal rotation strategies like the Maximum Yield Rotation and the Global Market Rotation strategies. The real world is just not a 100% “risk on” or “risk off” world. Most of … Read more
An analysis of Harry Browne´s Permanent Portfolio and further enhancements towards: A Permanent Portfolio ETF Rotation Strategy employing Momentum, Mean Reversion, and Volatility Targeting. It’s not just cars. It’s investment strategies like the permanent portfolio, too. Vintage “all-weather” investment strategies are often simple, easy to execute and give amble ‘out-of-sample’ data. In other words one can see how they performed in life years after they have been proposed. And like the VW bug, they are … Read more
In a previous post we introduced our new investment strategy, the BUG. There has been a lot of interest but also some concerns when it comes to using leverage. We are introducing a version of the BUG for non-leveraged accounts.
In this version we allocate amongst 6 ETFs: SPY, TLT, GLS, CWB, TIP and PCY. Again as in the original strategy we use these heuristics: Timing (using a simple average rule), Volatility Targeting (we reduce exposure to more volatile ETFs), Momentum (we reduce the size of the worst performer and add to the rest). We don’t employ short term mean reversion and we only trade up to 4 assets.
From the next strategy email on, the Bond Rotation Strategy will also use adaptive ETF allocation, to make is more suitable as IRA or 401k Investment Strategy. This new technique allows a 30% higher Sharpe (return to risk) ratio. Together with this change we have also changed the ETF selection from the old: AGG – iShares Core Total US Bond (4-5yr) BOND – PIMCO Total Return ETF CWB – SPDR Barclays Convertible Bond HYLD – AdvisorShs Peritus … Read more
Diversification is a cornerstone to successful investing. In simple form, when measurably diverse assets are combined in a portfolio, the investors portfolio risks are reduced without any sacrifice of returns. This 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. When one asset is going down while the other is going up, the portfolios risk is reduced without the normal penalty of risk/return trade-offs. We take advantage of that when our systems dynamically blend things like the S&P 500 and treasury bonds, which often exhibit negative correlation to each other (which is ideal).
Applying Portfolio Diversification to Strategies: Our subscribers can take this take a step further. Our investing algorithms take on a blend of the properties of their underlying assets combined with the “alpha” edges from the investing rules. The returns of each investing strategy should be thought of as an asset, which are different and unique from the underlying holdings. So holding a portfolio of strategies functions much like holding a portfolio of assets. To evaluate the risk profile of the strategy, we examine the history of the returns of those strategies, much like when holding a basket of stocks the historical returns of each stock would be evaluated.