We’ve added a major new feature to our members area: historical allocation analysis. Every strategy that we track now includes a brand new subpage, which is updated daily and devoted to helping members better understand how each asset class has contributed to the strategy’s performance. In this blog post, we discuss this new feature. Note […]
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Why TAA Has Been So Successful in Crises
Most Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies have followed the same basic storyline. They keep pace with the market during the good times (like we find ourselves in right now), and shine during the bad times. To illustrate, the graphs below shows the average return of all of the TAA models that we track (orange) versus the […]
Annual Turnover (Unglamorous but Important) + A Development Update
We’ve added a new statistic to the backtests and screener for all of the strategies that we track: Annual Turnover. We realize that this isn’t the most glamorous of metrics, but we think it’s an important data point to consider when analyzing a strategy. Annual turnover measures the rate at which a strategy replaces its […]
Tactical Asset Allocation in January
This is a summary of the January performance of a number of excellent tactical asset allocation strategies. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies are broadly representative of the TAA space. Read more about our backtests or let AllocateSmartly help […]
Keuning & Keller’s Generalized Protective Momentum
This is a test of the Generalized Protective Momentum (GPM) strategy from JW Keuning and Wouter Keller. The strategy builds off of the authors’ popular Protective Asset Allocation (PAA) model that we discussed last month. Results for the GPM strategy from 1989, net of transaction costs, follow. Read more about our backtests or let AllocateSmartly […]
Paul Novell’s Tactical Bond Strategy
This is a test of a tactical bond strategy from Paul Novell of Investing for a Living. The model rotates among a broad basket of bond asset classes based on rules similar to Gary Antonacci’s Dual Momentum. Results from 1970, net of fees, follow. Read more about our backtests or let AllocateSmartly help you follow […]
Tactical Asset Allocation in December
This is a summary of the recent performance of a number of excellent tactical asset allocation strategies. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies are broadly representative of the TAA space. Read more about our backtests or let AllocateSmartly help […]
PortfolioCharts’ Golden Butterfly
This is a test of the “Golden Butterfly”, the homegrown buy & hold strategy from PortfolioCharts.com. PortfolioCharts is to buy & hold what AllocateSmartly is to tactical asset allocation, an independent and unbiased catalog of strategy performance, so when they put their stamp of approval on a portfolio, it deserves consideration. This strategy is similar […]
Protective Asset Allocation
This is a test of two variations of the Protective Asset Allocation (PAA) strategy from Wouter Keller and JW Keuning’s paper: PAA: A Simple Momentum-based Alternative to Term Deposits. The strategy is notable for its aggressive use of a “crash protection” asset that has resulted in extremely low drawdowns relative to return. Results from 1989, […]
Testing Popular Portfolio Optimization Techniques
This is a test of a number of popular approaches to portfolio optimization. Each seeks to answer the question: given a universe of assets, how much should we allocate to each? We’ve intentionally made these tests as simple and fair (read: unoptimized) as possible in order to best represent each technique. Here we focus on […]