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.

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ETF Sector Trading: The effect of daily, weekly and monthly timeframes

I recently gave a presentation on Sector trading using the 200-day moving average at the Northwest Traders and Technical Analysts. Some questions asked were:

• What if we only trade this monthly?
• What if we used weekly bars to trade only weekly?
• What if we used weekly bars to trade monthly?

The reason for these questions was to reduce the frequency of having to check signals and the total number of trades. My first response was that the results would probably be a little lower and the trade count also would be lower. But that was just a guess. I have been doing this long enough to know that I wrong 40% of the time. Curiosity got the better of me and I tested it out.

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Sector trading using the 200-day moving average – Part 2

Several readers asked for additional tests to be done on the strategy on Sector trading using the 200-day moving average. We will be testing allocated 11% per ETF instead of 10%, using asymmetric number of days and adding IEF to the SPY MA200 10 day test.

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Sector trading using the 200-day moving average

A user commented on ETF Sector Rotation post about a simple idea for trading the sector ETFs, which I can’t believe I have never tried. I like keeping things simple just like my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu game.

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Country ETF Rotation – Reader’s Suggestions

My last post on Country ETF Rotation generated several ideas of what to test to improve the results. See the original post for the list ETFs being traded. One important test I left out from the original post was a baseline case. An idea applied to all the tests was trading more ETFS. For all tests, I will be showing results of trading (2,5,8) ETFs in the spreadsheet. Testing is from 1/1/2007 to 12/31/2016.

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Country ETF Rotation

My recent research has been focused on finding strategies that are not highly correlated with the S&P500 index. One of my most popular posts is ETF Sector Rotation. The idea for this post is to apply those concepts to a list of country ETFs. Would this produce decent returns that were not highly correlated to the S&P500 index? I would like to see the correlation under .50. What about adding a filter to not enter an ETF when it is highly correlated with the S&P 500?

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Is synthetic XIV/VXX data safe to use?

I have done several posts about trading XIV & VXX. In these posts (here, here and here) I refer to using synthetic data before these ETFs started trading. I supported the use of the data due to the very high correlation of daily returns during the overlap period. With a correlation of .97, I thought great the data should be good to use for backtesting.

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Double 7’s Strategy

In the book, Short Term Trading Strategies that Work, which Larry Connors and I published in early 2008, we wrote about a simple strategy called “Double 7’s Strategy.” Through the years people often ask about this strategy. Does something that simple really work? How does it do in a portfolio? Does the concept work on stocks? Today, we will be answering these questions.

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Five ETF Monthly Rotation Strategy

I was working on another blog post when I saw this post Inferences From Backtest Results Are False Before Proven True on Price Action Lab. Mike has a challenge to replicate a very simple test. I often get email from people trying to replicate results from one of my blog posts and thought this would be fun to do. I cover some of this topic on my post Backtesting is Hard.

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Multiple Time Frames for Scoring ETF Rotational Strategies

Today we have a guest post from David Weilmuenster who I worked with while at Connors Research.

A widely applied technique for scoring assets in rotational systems is to rank those assets by their price momentum, or return, over a given historical window and to rotate into the assets with higher momentum. This approach seeks to capitalize on the well-demonstrated tendency for price momentum to persist. But, it begs some questions:

1. “What is an appropriate historical period for measuring price momentum?” Clearly, the momentum of a given asset can rank quite differently compared to the tradable universe over 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months.
2. “Is one historical period sufficient?” If relative momentum can vary widely depending on the historical window, would it be better to consider multiple slices of history?
3. Is higher momentum always preferable to lower momentum, especially if the system rules filter the tradable universe before scoring the ETFs for rotation?

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