Category Archives for "ETFs"
February 26, 2020
- in ETFs , Market Timing , Research by Cesar Alvarez
Market will be up 9.7% in 3 months!
When this sell-off indicator triggers, it is correct 100% of the time! On average the market is up only 2.6% in 3 months.
OR NOT!
December 11, 2019
- in ETFs , Research , Trend Following by Cesar Alvarez
Trend-Following Plus Momentum in ETFs
In a previous post, Trend-following vs. Momentum in ETFs, I compared trend-following and momentum to see which produced better results on a basket of ETFs. In the post, I mentioned combining trend-following and momentum into one strategy to see if combined they can beat buy and hold more often.
November 13, 2019
- in ETFs , Trend Following by Cesar Alvarez
Trend-following vs. Momentum in ETFs
In Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) or Dual Momentum (DM) strategies, they often will use trend-following or momentum to decide whether to invest in asset or not. I have two questions. One, how often does either trend-following or momentum out-perform buy and hold? Two, of the two which one out-performs the other more often?
August 7, 2019
- in ETFs , Market Timing by Cesar Alvarez
Market Timing and Bond ETFs
In my last two posts, Market Timing with a Canary, Gold, Copper, LQD, IEF and much more and Day of Month and Market Timing, I assumed that we earned no interest in cash. Most methods did a good job of telling us when to be in the SPY and when to be in cash. How much could we boost returns by investing the cash in a bond fund?
July 10, 2019
- in ETFs , Market Timing by Cesar Alvarez
Day of Month and Market Timing
In my previous post, Market Timing with a Canary, Gold, Copper, LQD, IEF and much more, I tested several market timing methods. The signal was checked on the last day of the month. Now the question is what happens if we check on a different day? How different will the results be?
June 12, 2019
- in ETFs , Market Timing , Research by Cesar Alvarez
Market Timing with a Canary, Gold, Copper, LQD, IEF and much more
One commonality in my strategies is the inclusion of a market timing component. This could be a signal to go into cash or reduce position size or enter a ‘safe’ ETF. This applies to my swing trading strategies, my monthly rotation strategies and my Tactical Assert Allocation strategies. As a researcher, I am always on a looking to improve this part of my strategies.
There have been a handful of market timing methods I have been wanting to test and compare with my current 200-day moving average version. I collected enough of them to test all at once and to compare the results.
April 3, 2019
- in ETFs , Trend Following by Cesar Alvarez
The 50/50 SPY Strategy
I was talking to my trading buddy about the annoying part of trend following strategies. They may get you out of the major sell off but then you miss part of the run up. Using a 200-day moving average on the SPY would have got you out in late 2018. This would have been within 10% from the top and you would not had the pain of the additional 10% drop in December. But one would not have gotten back in until late February, missing a good part of the run up.
There is a dual nature of trend following strategies. They generally reduce your drawdowns during the bad years at the expense of underperforming during the good years. This underperformance can be big and difficult to deal with. Now if one is in the conserve wealth (vs grow wealth) part of their life, then this may be okay, but still difficult to deal with.
What follows is a possible way to balance these issues.
February 20, 2019
- in ETFs , Rotation by Cesar Alvarez
ETF Bond Rotation
In my last post I discussed SPY/TLT rotation strategies. Today, I will be using the same ideas from the post but on a basket of bond ETFs.
January 30, 2019
- in ETFs , Rotation , Trend Following by Cesar Alvarez
SPY TLT Rotation
For my retirement accounts, I like to trade ETF strategies that require little work. One strategy we have all seen is the SPY/TLT strategy. There are many flavors of this concept. Some pick the best one over the last N months. Then there are different ways of allocating a portion of the portfolio to each. I currently don’t trade any SPY/TLT strategy and wanted to see if there was something interesting here.
February 28, 2018
- in ETFs , Research by Cesar Alvarez
XIV Barbell Strategy
Well that was fun! I have been telling my trading buddy and anyone else that would listen that I fully expected XIV to open at zero one day. Now I did not expect it to happen so soon or the way it did. I trade a strategy that can be long XIV or long VXX or in cash. Because of the very likely possibility of XIV blowing up, I had constructed my portfolio using ideas from the barbell portfolio and this post, Taming High Return and High Risk. I was lucky and not in XIV when it did implode on Feb 6, 2018. Could a buy and hold trader of XIV made money even after the crash using these concepts? I was curious.
Barbell Portfolio
The idea of the barbell portfolio is that you put a small percentage of your assets (say 10%) in a very risky, high return asset like XIV. Then with the other 90%, you have it in something very safe like cash. Then at predetermined periods, you rebalance to be back to 10/90 allocation. These rebalance periods can be monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and yearly. What rebalance period you choose and the when can have a huge impact on your results.
