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 […]
TAA Analysis
For the Nerds: Why We Conform All Strategies to a Common Set of Assets
This post gets a bit down into the weeds of how our backtest engine works, but we’ve received this question a few times recently, so we thought a blog post was in order for readers who are (like us) nerds. We conform all of the strategies that we track to a common set of assets […]
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 […]
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 [dead link]. For our test case, […]
Allocate Smartly Just Got Even Better
Allocate Smartly just got even better, with three awesome new features to help members make better Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) decisions: Multiple Custom Model Portfolios + Dashboard Portfolio Tranching Aggregate Asset Allocation Report Multiple Custom Model Portfolios A key component of our members area is what we call “custom model portfolios”. What is a model […]
Does the Day of the Month Matter?
Be sure to check out our guest post over at research supersite Alpha Architect: Tactical Asset Allocation: Does the Day of the Month Matter? Backtests of long-term strategies like tactical asset allocation are usually shown trading at the end of the month, both because it makes the analysis simpler and because monthly asset class data […]