Category: timing model

The Long Road

Leave a comment

September 25, 2016

Almost daily I read about the coming implosion in the stock market.  There are only two price predictions: up and down.  One of them will be right.  So far, no catastrophe, so why worry?  Should an innocent investor just Ease On Down the Road? (Video from the 1978 movie).

Unfortunately, the stock market road looks like Rt. 120 south of Mono Lake in California. The road is like a ribbon, marked by highs that are many years apart, more years than the majority of us will live in retirement.  In the graph from below from multpl.com I have marked up the decades-long periods before the inflation adjusted SP500 surpassed a previous high.  It is truly humbling.

It took 23 years for the market to finally surpass the high set in 1906.  Happy days!  Well, not quite.  Several months later came the stock market crash of 1929.  In 1932, the market fell near the 1920 lows.  In 1956, 27 years after the ’29 crash, the market finally notched a new high. In more recent decades, the market spent 23 years in a trough from 1969 to 1992.  Lastly, we have this most recent period from the high set in 2000 to a new high set in 2015.

IF – yes, the big IF – a person could call the high in a market, that would sure be nice, as Andy Griffith might say. (Youngsters can Google this.)  Of course, Andy would be suspicious of any city slicker who claimed to have such a crystal ball.  Knowing the high mark in advance is magic.  Knowing a previous high is not magic.

Looking at the chart we can see that the price in each period falls below the high of the period before it.  In the period marked “1” in the graph, the price fell below the high set in 1892. In period marked “2”, the price fell below the high set in 1906.  In the period marked “3”, the price fell below the high set in 1929.  In this last period marked “4” the price – well, it never fell below the high set in 1969.  The run up in the 1990s was so extreme that the market still has not truly corrected, according to some. Even the low set in 2008 didn’t come close to falling below the highs of that 1969-1992 period.  An investor who used a price rule that had been good for more than a hundred years found that the rule did not apply this time.

In 2008-2009, why didn’t prices fall below the high of the 1969-1992 period? They would have had to fall below 500 and in March 2009, there were a number of market predictors calling for just that. On March 9th, the SP500 index closed at 676, after touching a low of 666 that day.  The biblical significance was not lost on some. Announcements from major banks that they had actually been profitable in January and February caused a sharp rebound in investor confidence.  The newly installed Obama administration had promised some economic stimulus and the Federal Reserve added their own reassurances of monetary stimulus.

Did these fiscal and monetary relief measures prevent the market from fully purging itself?  Maybe.  Are stock prices wildly inflated because the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates so low for so long.  Could be.  How low are interest rates?  In 2013 the CBO predicted interest rates of 3-4% by this time.  They are still less than 1/2%.

How much are stock prices inflated?  Robert Shiller, the author of “Irrational Exuberance,” devised a price earnings ratio that removes most of the natural swings in earnings and the business cycle. Called the Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings ratio, or CAPE, it divides the current price of the SP500 index by a ten year period of inflation adjusted earnings.  The current CAPE ratio is just below the high ratio set in 2007 by a market riding a housing boom.  The only times when the CAPE ratio has been higher are the periods during the housing bubble (2008), the dot-com boom (2000), and the go-go 1920s when many adults could buy stocks on credit.  Each of these booms was marked by a price bust that lasted at least a decade.

Price rules require some kind of foresight, and crystal balls are a bit cloudy.  There is a strong argument to be made for allocation, a balance of investments that generally are non-correlated, i.e. one investment goes up in price when another goes down.  An investor does not have to frequently monitor prices as with price rules. A once or twice a year reallocation is usually sufficient.

In an allocation strategy, equities and bonds are the most common investments because they generally counterbalance each other. A portfolio with 60% stocks and 40% bonds, or 60/40, is a common allocation. (Some people write the bond allocation first, as in 40/60.)   Shiller has recommended that an investor shift their allocation balance toward bonds when the CAPE ratio gets this high. For example, an investor would move toward a 60% bond, 40% stock allocation.

To see the effects of a balanced allocation, let’s look at a particularly ugly period in the market, the period from 2000 through 2011.  The stock market went through two downturns.  From 2000-2003, the SP500 lost 43% (using monthly prices). The decline from October 2007 to March 2009 was a nasty 53%.  In  2011 alone, a budget battle between the Obama White House and a Republican Congress prompted a sharp 20% fall in prices. During those 12 years, the SP500 index lost about 10%, excluding dividends.

During that period, a broad bond index mutual fund (VBMFX) more than doubled. Equities down, bonds up.  A rather routine portfolio composed of 60% stocks and 40% bonds had a total return of 3.75% per year.  Considering the stock market losses during that period, that return sounds pretty good. Inflation averaged 2.6% so that balanced portfolio had a real gain of about 1.2%.  Better than negative, we reason.  On the other hand, a portfolio weighted at 40% stocks, 60% bonds had a total annual return of 4.75%, making the case for Shiller’s strategy of shifting allocations.

There is also the nervousness of a portfolio, i.e. how much an investor gets nervous depending on one’s age and the various components of a portfolio.  During the 2000-2003 downturn in which the SP500 lost 43%, an investor with a 60/40 allocation had just 14% less than what they started with in the beginning of 2000. Not bad. 2008 was not pleasant but they still had 11% more than what they started with.  That is a convincing case for a balanced portfolio, then, even in particularly tumultuous times.

Can an investor possibly do any better by reacting to certain price triggers?  We already discussed one price rule that was fairly reliable for a hundred years till it wasn’t. The problem with rules are the exceptions and it only takes one exception to bruise an average 20 year retirement cycle.  Another price rule is a medium term one, the 50 day and 200 day averages.  These are called the Golden Cross and Death Cross.  Rules involve compromises and this rule is no exception.  In some cases, an investor may sell just when the selling pressure has mostly been exhausted.  Such a case was July 2010 when the 50 day average of the SP500 crossed below the 200 average, a Death Cross, and triggered a sell signal.  The market reversed over the following months and when the 50 day average crossed back above the 200 day average, a Golden Cross, an investor bought back in at a price 10% higher than they had sold!

The same scenario happened again in August 2011 – January 2012, buying back into the market in January 2012 at a price 10% higher than the price they sold at in August 2011.  These short term price swings are called whipsaws and they are the bane of strict price rules. In the past year there were two such whipsaws, one of them causing a 5% loss.  Clearly, this traditional trading rule needs a toss into the garbage can!  What works for a few decades may fail in a later decade.

For those investors who want a more active approach to managing a portion of their portfolio, what is needed is a flexible price rule that has been fairly reliable over six decades.  As a bull market tires, the monthly price of a broad market index like the SP500 begins to ride just above the two year average.  The monthly close will dip below that benchmark average for a month as the bull nears exhaustion.  If it continues to decline, that is a good indication that the market has run its course.  The price rule is an attention trigger that may not necessarily prompt action.

Let’s look at a few examples.  President Kennedy’s advisors were certainly aware of this pattern when the market fell below the two year mark in 1962.  They began pushing for tax cuts, particularly for those at the highest levels.  Rumors of a tax cut proposal helped lift the market back above the benchmark by the end of 1962   In early 1963, JFK made a formal proposal to lower personal rates by a third and corporate rates by 10% (At that time, corporations paid a 52% rate). An investor who sold after a two month decline suffered the same whipsaw effect, buying back into the market at about 10% higher than they sold.  However, at that selling point in 1962, rumors of tax cuts were helping the market rebound and might have caused an investor to wait another week before selling. The market had  in fact reached its low.

In mid-1966, the SP500 fell below its 24 month benchmark for seven months.  Escalating defense spending for the Vietnam War helped arrest that decline.

The bull market finally tired in the summer of 1969 and dropped below the 24 month benchmark in July.  The index treaded water just below the benchmark for a few months before starting a serious decline of 25%.  More than a year passed before the monthly price closed above the benchmark in late 1970.

The 1973 Israeli-Arab war and the consequent oil embargo threw the SP500 into a tailspin.  The price dipped below the average a few times starting in May 1973 before crossing firmly below in November 1973.  After falling almost 40%, the price finally crossed back above the benchmark in late 1974.  Remember that this was a particularly difficult fourteen year period marked by war, high unemployment and inflation, and a whopping four recessions.  The SP500 crossed below its ten year – not month, but year – average in 1970, again in 1974-75, and lastly in 1978.  Such crossings happen infrequently in a century and are great buying opportunities when they do happen.  To have it happen three periods in one decade is historic.

I’ll skip some minor events in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  In most episodes an investor can take advantage of these opportunities to step aside as the market swoons, then buy back in at a price that is 5-10% lower when the market recovers.

The most recent episodes were in November 2000 when the SP500 fell below its benchmark at about 1300. When it crossed  back over the benchmark in August 2003, the index was at 1000, a nice bargain.  This was another crossing below the ten year average.  The last one was in 2008 when the monthly price fell below the benchmark in January.  Although it skirted just under the average it didn’t cross back above the 24 month average.  In June it began a decline that steepened in September as the financial crisis exploded. Again the index fell below its ten year average. By the time the price closed back above the benchmark in November 2009, an investor could buy in at a 20% discount from the June 2008 price.

In September 2015 and again in February of this year, the index dropped briefly below its 24 month average. They were short drops but it doesn’t take much of a price correction because the index is riding parallel with the benchmark, above it by only 100 points, or less than 5%.  Corporate profits have declined for five quarters.  The bull is panting but still standing.

As we have seen in past exhaustions, there is a lot of political pressure to do something.  What could refuel the bull market? Monetary policy seems exhausted.  The Federal Reserve has indicated that they will use negative interest rates if they have to but they are very reluctant to do so.  Just this past week, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) indicated that their policy of negative interest rates is not helping their economic growth.  The BOJ had started down a negative interest rate path and has now warned other central banks not to follow.

What about fiscal policy? The upcoming election could usher in some fiscal policy changes but that seems unlikely.  Donald Trump has joined with Democrats advocating for more infrastructure spending but that is unlikely to pass muster with a conservative House holding the purse strings and a federal public debt approaching $20 trillion.  Only sixteen years ago, it was less than $6 trillion.  Democrats keep reminding everyone that the Federal Government can borrow money at very cheap rates.  However, the level of debt matters and Republicans will likely control the money in this next Congress.

Managing an entire portfolio with a price rule is a bit aggressive but might be appropriate for some investors who want to take a more active approach with a portion of their portfolio.  This price rule – or let’s call it guidance – is more a pain avoidance tool than a timing tool.

Timing Models

Leave a comment

May 22, 2016

Long term moving averages can confirm the shifting trends of market sentiment and market watchers customarily watch for crossings of two averages.  The 50 week (1 year) average of the SP500 index just crossed below the 100 week (2 year) average, indicating a  broad and sustained lack of confidence.  Falling oil prices since mid-2014 have led to severe earnings declines at some of the large oil companies in the SP500.  The index is selling for about the same price as the two year average.

What to do?  These crossings or junctions can mark a period of some good buying opportunities – unless they’re not – and that’s the rub with indicators like this one.  Downward crossings typically occur after there has already been a 5 – 15% decline from a recent high.  If an investor sells some stocks at that time, they wind up selling at an interim low, and regret  their action when the market rises shortly thereafter.  They should have bought instead of sold.  AAAARGHHH, a false positive!  Twice in the 1980s, the sentiment shift was less than a year long and an investor who did act lost 10 – 20% as the market climbed after several months.

Conversely, after a 10-15% decline, some investors do buy more stocks, figuring that the excess optimism, or “fluff,” has been shaken out of the market.  Then comes that sinking feeling as the market continues to decline, and decline, and decline.  In April 2001 and July 2008, the 50 week average crossed below the 100 week average.  Investors who lightened up on stocks at those times saved themselves some pain and a lot of money as the broader market continued to lose another 30% or so.

There are not one but two problems with timing models: timing both the exit from and entry back into the market.  Over several decades the majority of active fund managers – professionals who study markets – did not get it right.  They underperformed a broad index like the SP500 because the index is actually a composite of the buying and selling decisions of millions of market participants.  John Bogle, the founder of the now gigantic Vanguard Funds, made exactly this point in his dissertation in the 1950s.  A half century later, this “wacky idea” of index investing has taken over much of the industry.

Consistently successful timing is very difficult and has tax consequences in some accounts.  Investors are encouraged to focus instead on their investment allocation to match their tolerance for risk and volatility, and to consider any prospective income that they might need from a portfolio.

Since 1960, the average annual price gain of the SP500 index has been 6.7%.  Add in an average yield (dividend) of 3% and the total return is almost 10% that an investor gains by doing nothing, a formidable hurdle for any timing model.

Within an allocation model, though, is the idea that an investor might shift a small portion of a portfolio from stocks to bonds and back in response to market signals.  In several previous articles I have looked at a Case-Shiller CAPE10 model (here, here, here, and here) as well as another crossing model using the 50 day and 200 day moving averages, dramatically named the Golden Cross and Death Cross (here, here, and here.)  As already mentioned, we want to avoid some of the false signals of crossing averages.

Instead of a crossing, we can simply use a change in direction of both averages.  When not just one, but both, long term averages turn down, we would move a portion of money from stocks to bonds, and in the opposite direction when both averages turned up.

Over the course of several decades, this strategy has been suprisingly successful.  The market sometimes experiences a decade when prices may be volatile but are essentially flat.  From 2000 – 2012 the SP500 index went up and down but was the same price at the beginning and end of that 12 year period.  1967 to 1977 was another such period, a stagnant period when an investor’s money would be better put to use in the bond market rather than the stock market.

In recent decades, this long term weekly model would have favored stocks from 1982 to March 2001 while the market gained 850%, an annual price gain of 11%.  The model would have shifted money back to stocks in August 2003 at a price about 25% less than the exit price in March 2001. In March 2008, the model would have favored an exit from stocks to bonds.  The stock market at that time was about the same price that it had been 7 years earlier in March 2001.  The model captured a 30% gain while the index went nowhere.

In the 1967 – 1977 period, the model did signal several entries and exits that produced a cumulative 8% price loss over the decade but the model favored the bond market for half of that period when bonds were earning 8% per year, a net gain.

In almost two years, the SP500 has changed little; the yield is less than 2%, far lower than the 3% average of the past 50 years.  However, the broader bond market has also changed little in that time and is paying just a little over 2%.  There are simply periods when strategies and alternatives have little effect. Although the 50 week average crossed below the 100 week average earlier this month, they are essentially horizontal.  The 100 week average is still rising, but barely so, a time of drift and inertia.  In hindsight, we may say it was the calm before a) the storm (1974), or b) the surge (1995). Usually the calm doesn’t last more than two years so we can expect some clear direction by the end of the summer.

/////////////////////////////

It’s the economy, stupid!

One of the myths of Presidential politics is that Presidents have a lot to do with the strength or weakness of the economy, a superhero narrative carefully cultivated by the two dominant parties.  Here’s a comparison of GDP growth during Democratic and Republican administrations. The Dems have it up on the Reps since 1928, chiefly because the comparison starts near the beginning of the Great Depression when the Reps held the Presidency.

For several reasons, GDP data is unreliable during the Depression and WW2 years.  First, the GDP concept wasn’t formalized till just before the start of WW2 so data collection was new, primitive and after the fact.  Secondly, this 14 year period includes an extraordinary amount of government spending which warped the very concept of GDP.  The WPA program that put so many to work during the depression years was a whopping 7% of GDP (Source), like spending $2 trillion dollars, or half the Federal budget, in today’s economy.

The Federal Reserve begins their GDP data series after WW2 when data collection was much improved. If you’re a Dem voter, don’t mention this unreliable data.  Just tell friends, family and co-workers that the Dems have averaged 4% GDP growth since 1927; the Reps only 1.7%.  If you’re a Republican voter, exclude the 20 year period from 1928 to 1947 and begin when the Federal Reserve trusts the data. Starting from 1947,  Republicans have presided over economies with 2.75% annual growth during 36 Presidential years.  During the 30 years Dems have held the Presidency, there has been a slighly greater growth rate of 3.1%.

In short, economic growth is about the same no matter which party holds the Presidency.  Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone till after the election is over.  Legislation by the House and Senate has a much greater impact on the economy.

///////////////////////////

Small Business

“If America is going to dominate the world again, the country has to fix the spirit of free enterprise. Small-business startups are in serious decline.”

“Gallup finds that one-quarter of Americans say they’ve considered becoming business owners but decided not to. ”

These foreboding quotes are from a recent Gallup poll.  Small businesses employ more than 50% of employees and are responsible for the majority of job growth yet many politicians and most voters pay little attention to the concerns of small business owners.  The giant corporations get most of the press, praise and anger.  Could the lack of small business growth be responsible for the lackadaisical growth of the entire economy during this recovery?  As the population  continues to age, growth will be critical to fund the dedication of community resources to both the old and young.

The BLS routinely tracks the Employment-Population Ratio, which is the percentage of people over 16 who are working, currently 60%.  But this ratio does not fully capture the total tax pressures on working people since it excludes those under 16, who require a great deal of community resources.  When we track the number of workers as a percent of the total population, we see a long term decline.  As this ratio declines, the per-worker burdens rise for it is their taxes that must support programs for those who are not working, the young and the old.

Regulatory burdens hamper many small businesses. A recent incident with a Denver brewery highlights the sometimes arbitrary rulemaking that business owners encounter.  Agencies protest that their mission is to ensure public safety.  An unelected manager or small committee in a department of a state or local agency may be the one who decides what is the public safety.  As the rules become more onerous and capricious, fewer people want to chance their savings, their livelihood to start a small business.  As fewer businesses start up, tax revenues decline and the debate grows ever hotter: “more taxes from those with money” vs “less generous social programs.”  Policy changes happen at a glacial pace, further exacerbating the problems until there is some crisis and then the changes are instituted in a haphazard fashion. Since we are unlikely to change this familiar pattern, the issues, anger and contentiousness of this election season are likely to increase in the next decade.  Keep your seat belts buckled.

Portfolio Allocation and Timing

Leave a comment

November 15, 2015

Gone Fishin’ Portfolio

I found this portfolio in a pile of old paperwork.  The idea is to allocate investment dollars in a number of buckets, then more or less forget about it, rebalancing once a year.  The portfolio is 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% other

I compared this broadly balanced portfolio #1 with a simpler version #2: 60% stocks, 40% bonds.  Because the Vanguard mutual fund VTSMX is weighted toward U.S. large cap stocks, I split the stock portion of the portfolio with an index of small cap value stocks VISVX.  The 40% bond component is an index of  intermediate-term corporate grade bonds VFICX.  I also included a very simple portfolio #3 without the split in the stock portfolio.  The 60% stocks is represented by one fund VTSMX.  The results from Portfolio Visualizer  include dividends.

Note that there is little difference between Portfolios #2 and #3 over this time period.  Although the Gone Fishin’ portfolio lagged the other two during this time period, it did do better during the period 2000 – 2006.

*****************************

Market timing

Another approach is a fairly simple market timing technique as shown in this paper “A Quantative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation”  There is no heavy math in the paper.  The timing rule is simple:  buy the SP500 when the monthly close is above the 10 month moving average; sell when the monthly close is below the 10 month average.  Using this system, an investor would have sold an ETF like SPY on the first trading day of September this year  because August’s close was below the ten month average.  After the index rebounded in October and closed above the 10 month average, an investor would have bought back in on the first trading day in November. The average “turnaround,” a buy and a sell signal, is less than one a year.  These short term swings are sometimes called “whipsaws,” where an investor loses several percent by selling after a quick downturn then buying in after prices recover quickly.  The payoff is that an investor avoids the severe 50% drawdowns of 2008 and 2000.

The author of the paper performed a 112 year backtest on this system. He excluded taxes, commissions and slippage in the calculations and used the closing price on the final day of the month as his buy and sell price points. He notes some reasons for these omissions later in the paper which I found inadequate. I recommend using the opening price (ETF) or end of the day price (mutual fund) of the day following the end of the month as  a practical real world backtesting strategy.  Very few individual investors can buy or sell at the closing price and there can be a lot of price movement, or slippage, in the final trading minutes before the close.

Commissions can be estimated at some small percentage.  To exclude commissions is to estimate them at 0% and present an investor with unrealistic returns, a common backtesting fault of many trading or allocation systems.  The same can be said for taxes.  Even if the guesstimate is a mere 1%, it is better than the 0% effective estimate of tax costs when excluded from the backtest.

The difference in annual real, or inflation-adjusted, return between this timing model and “buy and hold” is 4/100ths of 1% per year (p. 23) Because the timing model avoids the severe portfolio drawdowns of a buy and hold stratgegy (p. 28), that tiny difference translates into a difference in compounded return that is less than 1% which produces a huge 250%+ difference in portfolio balances at the end of the 112 year testing period.  None of us will be investing for that long a period but it does illustrate the effect of small incremental differences.

The author then combines an allocation model with the timing model using five global asset classes: US stocks, foreign stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities, assigning 20% of the portfolio to each class.  He backtested this allocation with the same timing strategy vs a buy and hold strategy (p. 30-31).  The advantages of the timing strategy are apparent during severe downturns as in 1973, 2000 and 2008.  A buy and hold strategy took eight years after 1973 to recover and catch up to the timing strategy.  The buy and hold strategy never caught up to the timing strategy after the 2000-2003 downturn in the market.  In 2008, it fell even further behind, highlighting the superiority of the timing strategy.

Returns are important, of course, but volatility and drawdown are especially critical for older investors who do not have as many years to recover.  From 1973 – 2012, the timing model has only one losing year – 2008 – and the loss for the entire portfolio was a mere 6/10ths of a percent (p. 32).

*****************************

October jobs report

A few weeks ago I linked to an article on Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman.  On his web site, he presented a sobering and thorough analysis of the October jobs report.

Stockman breaks down the numbers into “breadwinner” higher paying jobs and the relatively lower paying leisure and hospitality jobs that account for too much of the jub creation in the past fifteen years.  Goods producing jobs – those in manufacturing, construction, mining and timber – are still far below 2000 levels.

“massive money printing and 83 months running of ZIRP [zero interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve] have done nothing for the goods producing economy or breadwinner jobs generally.”

*****************************

Obama’s numbers

A president has far less effect on the economy than the political rhetoric would have one believe.  Despite that fact, each President is judged on his “numbers” as though he were a dictator, a one man show.  With one year to go in his second term, here are the latest numbahs from the reputable FactCheck.