In our previous post, we touched on FX rates and their impact on international ETFs like EFA or EEM. In short, because international ETFs trading in the US are denominated in USD, most are affected not only by changes in underlying assets, but also by changes in the exchange rate between USD and local currencies (1). […]
TAA Analysis
How Members Are Using Our Site and What That Says About TAA Investors
We’re in unique position to analyze the behavior of Tactical Asset Allocation investors. Our platform helps members analyze 40+ published TAA strategies from many angles, including: historical performance, tax efficiency, exposure to rising interest rates, etc. Members can combine those strategies together into what we call “custom model portfolios”, which they can follow in near […]
Keller Ratio: Finding the Best Strategy for an Investor’s Unique Risk Tolerance
We wanted to take a moment to highlight a post from the always smart JW Keuning describing a novel approach for measuring how well a strategy has performed relative to drawdowns (losses): Presenting the Keller Ratio. Our preferred method for assessing a strategy’s return relative to drawdown has always been the Ulcer Performance Index, but […]
Tax Efficient Tactical Asset Allocation
New to Tactical Asset Allocation? Learn more: What is TAA? In our previous post, we looked at the tax impact of TAA for investors trading in taxable accounts. Using our database of more than 40 published TAA models we concluded that, while TAA as a whole has been relatively tax efficient, the particular strategies that […]
Tactical Asset Allocation & Taxes
Tactical asset allocation, by its nature, generates more transactions than buy & hold. Investors trading in taxable accounts would be justifiably concerned that the negative tax consequences of that might outweigh the benefits of TAA by shifting returns to less advantageous short-term capital gains. Our newest member feature responds to those concerns. We track more […]
What to Expect from TAA When Markets Fall
Markets have started the month weak. We got spoiled last year. After such an abnormally long period of market calm, it’s natural for investors to feel a little anxious. We have no opinion on where the markets go from here. That’s why we’re quantitative traders. We put a lot of time into understanding these models so […]
More About Meta: The Best Asset Allocation Strategies Over Time
Last month we launched Meta Strategy, our own smart approach to combining the 40+ tactical asset allocation strategies tracked on our site. Each month, Meta selects 10 strategies and then trades their combined asset allocation. Members can follow Meta in near-real time. Each month’s 10 strategies are selected based on a number of factors (read […]
Sector Rotation with Fama-French Alphas
Allocate Smartly tests and tracks asset allocation strategies sourced from books, academic papers and other publications. Most of the strategies that we test though never make it on to this site. There are a variety of reasons that might be, but often it’s simply because they’re not very good. Usually we just let those strategies […]
Timing TAA Strategies Based on Relative Strength: A Suboptimal Approach
We track a wide range of tactical asset allocation strategies in near real-time (41 and counting), which members can combine into their own custom portfolios. We provide members with a wealth of data to understand how each strategy fits into a coherent trading plan, but we don’t tell members the absolute “best” ones to trade […]
Timing Luck and Portfolio Tranching
In this post we discuss portfolio “tranching” (i.e. dividing a portfolio into overlapping slices of the same underlying strategy) to minimize “timing luck”. This is an under discussed but important topic in tactical asset allocation. For more smart thoughts on portfolio tranching, see this excellent piece from Newfound Research. For our test case, we’ll use […]