US Treasuries and other interest rate sensitive instruments form the backbone of many asset allocation strategies. Investors are justifiably concerned about a future of rising interest rates and the potential impact on those instruments. In this post we model that impact on constant maturity Treasury assets like the ETF TLT, which tracks long-term (20+ year) […]
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Philosophical Economics’ Growth-Trend Timing
This is a test of the Growth-Trend Timing (GTT) model from the always thought-provoking Philosophical Economics. GTT combines trends in price and key economic indicators to switch between US equities and cash. Results from 1970, net of transaction costs, follow. Read more about our backtests or let AllocateSmartly help you follow this strategy in near real-time. […]
Tactical Asset Allocation in March
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 […]
New Features, Including Strategy Categories
We rolled out two awesome new features for members over the weekend: Strategy Categories Model Portfolio Historical Allocation Analysis Strategy Categories The list of tactical asset allocation strategies that we track is growing long (33 and counting). That’s a good thing; we want members to have access to as large a toolbox as possible. But […]
TAA Strategy Combining Risk Parity & Trend Following
This is a test of a tactical asset allocation strategy from the excellent paper: The Trend is Our Friend: Risk Parity, Momentum and Trend Following in Global Asset Allocation (1). The strategy combines two important tools: trend-following (to determine what assets to hold) and risk parity (to determine how much of each asset to hold), […]
Tactical Asset Allocation in February
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 […]
New Feature: Historical Allocation Analysis
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 […]
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 […]