Leif Peterson

Portfolio Diversification Is Key: Consider These ETFs

>Right now investors should be loading up on US equities

The above refers to companies whose earnings have steadily increased over the last several years, increased during Sept-Oct '08, Q1, Q2 of this year, and have projected earnings growth. Why would anyone invest in companies with decreased earnings. Finding such companies involves work, and when done, the list won't include equities with large PE ratios.

Portfolio Diversification Is Key: Consider These ETFs

GLD is based on gold, which is a commodity. The price of any commodity is based on what it can be sold for. For diversification, it would be better to construct a portfolio with less volatile index and currency ETFs, whose pairwise correlations range from -1 to 1. GLD and SPY price returns are quite volatile and driven by the combination of fear, emotion, market sentiment, corporate earnings, and economic reports.

Right now investors should be loading up on US equities, while preserving assets with 10-15% GLD (or gold mutual funds), 10-15% short-term treasuries(not cash reserves), 10-15% municipal bonds (e.g. PIMCO real return bond fund). Everything is pointing to devaluation of the dollar and inflation. The one currency that has done well over the subprime mortgage crisis (market crashes last Sept'08) is the Japanese Yen (FXY). You could also invest in some dollar bear ETFs [seekingalpha.com/artic...].

Asset Class Correlations

The majority of correlation coefficients shown are actually not that good. When you get down to 0.2 - 0.6, the association between the pairs of variables can still be jumpy. In fact, if you showed the X-Y scatter plots for a number of these matrix elements, you would probably be surprised at how noisy, jumpy and unrelated a lot of the series are. X-Y scatter plots would likely reveal problems and cause readers to ask why you tried to correlate a lot of these pair-vectors in the first place. At values of r=0.8 (-0.8) you will truly begin to see very tight patterns and tight trending between the data being correlated. The goal is to focus on high negative correlation, and the large negative correlation between the dollar and gold is actually good, since you would want to load a portfolio with something that is going to go up, on average, when the dollar goes down. (remember, though, gold is a commodity so the price is inflated in the direction in which the speculative buyers/sellers think it will go. ). Again, the majority of the coefficients are near-zero and low (less than r=0.2 or greater than r=-0.2) and uninteresting. Last, you are probably showing Pearson correlation, which can be biased by outlier pairs. Try using Spearman correlation, which is not biased by outliers.

Global Market Performance: Nowhere to Hide

This is a good article reflecting the "nowhere to hide principle" in global markets. While I realize this is not a forum, has anyone published a comparison of projected inflation/recession in Europe, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, China? Also, which sectors would be doing better in Europe, Brazil?