The Lumber-Gold Strategy was first published a decade ago, won the 2015 NAAIM Wagner Award, and continues to be cited today. The strategy trades based on the relative strength of lumber as a leading economic indicator, versus gold. How has the strategy performed since publication? Strategy results from 1987 follow. Results are net of transaction […]
Things That Don't Work
Cliff Smith’s BKLN Strategy
Questions about this long-ago strategy from Cliff Smith land in our inbox periodically (here’s another recent take). Smith’s simple strategy trades senior loan (aka leveraged loan) ETFs like BKLN, and has continued to be effective at timing these ETFs in the 10+ years since it was published. We’ve extended the author’s original test back to […]
Front-Running Seasonality in Country ETFs: An Extended Test
This is a test of a dynamic seasonality strategy from Quantpedia that selects from 23 individual country ETFs. We’ve extended the author’s test by 30+ years using MSCI index data. Backtested results from 1971 follow versus an equal-weight benchmark of those 23 country ETFs (1). Learn more about what we do and follow 90+ asset […]
Inflation and Stock/Treasury Correlation
There has been a surge in correlation between US stocks and Treasuries over the last couple of years. To illustrate, below we’ve shown the rolling 3-year correlation between US stocks and 10-year Treasuries since 1900 (based on monthly returns). Note the spike at the far right of the chart. What is correlation? In this context, […]
Super-Secret Proprietary Black Box Strategies
Note: This is a rare non-geeky, non-quantitative, stream of thought blog post. Because we’re so deep into this world of Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA), we’re sometimes asked for our thoughts on such-and-such black box TAA strategy. By “black box” we mean a strategy for which the trading rules are not disclosed to investors (nor to […]
Beware Strategies That Fall Down on Good Data
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 […]
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 […]
The Perils of Backtesting with Unrealistic Data
As readers hear us repeat often, our results tend to be less optimistic than you’ll find elsewhere. We do our best to show backtested results that are as realistic as possible (even though showing results that are as good as possible would probably be better for business). That’s partially a result of simple things, like accounting […]