Sources of long-term historical data are few and far between. Because it’s been generously provided for free, one of the most often used is data from Professor French (of Fama-French fame). Others include Shiller and Ibbotson. These datasets are fine for a first pass at testing out ideas, but they often don’t remotely match up […]
TAA Analysis
Buying Global Stocks at All-Time Highs
This analysis was inspired by EconomPic and Meb Faber. Here we test a simple strategy that goes long Global Stocks (ACWI) when they make a new all-time month-end high, otherwise US bonds. The takeaway: Don’t fear buying stock (indices) when they close at all-time highs. A new high shouldn’t be your only reason for buying […]
The Ubiquitous “Sell in May”
As a site that tracks all things asset allocation, it seems like a miss not to include the most well known of asset allocation strategies: “Sell in May and go away” (aka the Halloween Indicator). This is a fitting time to add it to the lineup: The strategy is killing it this year and a […]
Predictable End-of-Month Treasury ETF Returns
The inspiration for this post comes from a new paper titled Predictable End-of-Month Treasury Returns (h/t Capital Spectator). A description from the authors: We document a distinct pattern in the timing of excess returns on coupon Treasury securities. Average returns are positive and highly significant in the last few days of the month and are […]
Balancing Strategy and Asset Risk
New to Tactical Asset Allocation? Learn more: What is TAA? The Two Centuries Investments blog from Mikhail Samonov has become a new favorite of mine. More “thought heavy” than “numbers heavy”, Mikhail is a fount of novel ideas. In this piece he describes something I apply in my own investing (though never defined so succinctly): […]
TAA and Transaction Costs
New to Tactical Asset Allocation? Learn more: What is TAA? There are two hard costs that investors must consider when comparing a tactical asset allocation strategy to conventional buy & hold: (1) increased tax liability (if trading in a taxable account), and (2) increased trading costs (transaction costs and slippage). Because we track so many […]
The Threat of Rising Rates and the Impact on TAA vs B&H Investing
We’ve written a lot here and on our sister site BetterBuyAndHold.com about the threat of rising interest rates. You can read some of our past work projecting returns for Treasury ETFs and other interest rate sensitive assets here and here. In a nutshell, assuming that we’re near the tail end of this 37+ year march […]
Member Analysis: The Effect of Combining Strategies on Timing Luck
We enjoy hearing from members about their experiences using our platform to analyze and combine tactical asset allocation strategies. We do a bad job of sharing that feedback with other members, and that’s a shame, because there’s often a lot of wisdom in it. So let’s change that. What follows is an email from member […]
Comparing Tactical Asset Allocation ETFs to Public TAA Strategies
In this post we compare the performance of the 49 tactical asset allocation strategies that we track to 6 ETFs that provide all-in-one exposure to TAA. We were inspired by James Picerno’s Capital Spectator to run this analysis, so we’ve appropriated his list of 6 ETFs. Of the 6 ETFs, only one has provided results […]
FX Risk, International ETFs and Asset Allocation
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). […]