It is really not so much to beat the original pp. The purpose of this article is to show how investors with various goals (such as income seekers, risk averse, growth oriented etc.) can work under the pp framework and construct pp style portfolios to suit their needs.
We don't claim and don't intend to claim that all these pp varieties will surpass pp.
Regardless, the pp four corner framework is such a wonderful and simple foundation for investors of all sorts to base on, that we believe in firmly.
Comparing 22 Buffett and Lynch Type Stocks With Dividend ETFs [View article]
DVK and IF, I am not sure what you are looking for.
These articles are published with the goal of quantifying the stock portfolios recommended by magazines and other luminaries so that it's possible to measure whether they are any good at all.
Once these portfolios have been created, you can go back to it and see how it's doing.
We have published tactical and strategic asset allocation definitions -- we put a link in to explain it but SA takes it out.
Swensen 6 Asset Class Lazy Retirement Portfolio Review [View article]
Robbj,
MyPlanIQ is not affiliated with any broker, any mutual fund company or in fact, with any financial product company. We don't get paid by any financial institutions and we derive no commission whatsoever from the articles we publish.
We agree that ETFs or CEFs can be good vehicles to implement the portfolios we mentioned. We will furnish such plans in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.
Going Global in Fixed Income Bond ETF Investing [View article]
The U.S. bond market value is less than half (44%) of the size of the global debt market. European bond market is as large as the U.S. So there definitely is enough to 'go around'. We just need more international bond ETFs. In addition, people can get exposure through mutual funds and closed end funds.
Comparing the Fool's 5 Best Stocks to a Dividend Heavy ETF Portfolio [View article]
The ETF momentum strategy is defined in one of the links. The period of trading is dependent on the redemption period but the minimum trading period is a month. The dividends are reinvested.
The point of the exercise is to track portfolios that are recommended and provide some insight. We don't originate the portfolios, we are just tracking them.
Sharpe ratio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Sharpe ratio or Sharpe index or Sharpe measure or reward-to-variability ratio is a measure of the excess return per unit of risk in an investment asset or a trading strategy, named after William Forsyth Sharpe.
Does Greene's 'Gone Fishin' Portfolio' Stand the Test of Time? [View article]
My personal view (and I don't consider myself an expert) is that buy and hold was devised during relatively good times and the only lazy portfolio to navigate the downturn was the Harry Browne Permanent portfolio.
I would be interested to have the original proponents of the portfolios comment as to whether they would recommend another strategy with what they know now.
I think that retirement investing is a major crisis and you simply can't fire and forget your retirement investing. I had buy and hold through the downturn and even with financial advice, I lost as much as the market. I wish I had been more involved then!!
High Dividend ETFs: Preferred Stocks Down but Not Out [View article]
Thanks for the clarification. We said 'usually eceive guaranteed dividends" but we do agree that there are numerous occasions when preferred dividends are cut. So for sure, buyers beware.
Cash Is King for PIMCO's El-Erian and Global Multi-Asset Portfolios [View article]
Our algorithm analyzes the net effect: thus, if a sub portfolio holds long on stock A and another sub portfolio holds short (equal amount) on stock A, the net effect is 0 (not even cash in this case).
I absolutely agree that PIMCO does not take dramatic big swings on their actual allocation. However, even among stocks, for example, there are some which are high beta and some are low beta. Some may happen to correlate with inflation fear more than the others. So for example, if PIMCO holds more low beta stocks (such as consumer staples), we will report lower percentage in this case. Even worse (or better), if its majority stock holdings are correlating to international equities more (though they are US stocks), we will report the fund has some percentages of international equities.
All in all, we are reporting how their portfolio internals correlate with asset indices, not the actual holdings. It is really for us to understand the portfolio behavior, not the actual holdings.
TD Ameritrade recently announced their 101 commission free ETFs. These ETF's were chosen by Morningstar and provide portfolio building capabilities that are very good.
The Shell 401K plan doesn't have great funds but there are so many of them, that we can find good choices in all categories.
CAVEATS
1. The more funds that are available, the harder it can be -- or the more work -- for you to find the best ones. With an application like MPIQ, this is automated but if you are not using an application to do the work for you, more choices can be confusing. Most people will stick with what they know.
2. I don't know if there is such a thing as over extending the asset classes. We are sticking to areas that have been researched and proven so we are not making any comment on how many is too many.
3. The more asset classes and funds you have, the more trading you will do. That has implications on tax, commissions, effort and there is the danger of over trading -- i.e. you don't give an asset a chance to recover.
4. Over the longer time horizon, TAA has proven to be effective because there are ups and downs and TAA limits downsides. We can see that 2010 was an equities year and SAA beat TAA.
So, in conclusion (sorry to be long winded), within reasonable limits of asset classes and funds, the more choices you have, the better opportunity for higher risk adjusted returns.
Our limit is six asset classes. We see good returns on that. Depending on what new research turns up, we may add others.
I hope that this helps.
By the way, an expert user can always experiment with our system to try out additional classes and see the returns.
A Well-Balanced Wealth Management Investment Strategy [View article]
Kinabalu,
We started ValidFi with a goal to answer many of your questions.
The portfolios are setup to back test further back to whatever data we have in hand at the moment. For large/small cap, we will create separate portfolios to test out. Same for gold/long treasury bond. Right now, there is a model portfolio which tests the combination of both. The combination of the both runs from 1/1/1997 to present. For large/small cap, we could extend further back to 1987 or so, I believe.
The other major feature ValidFi has is to 'LIVE' monitor these strategies. Thus, you will see the portfolios with these strategies are updated daily, so that users could study various periods up to now.
Your question on what periods does it cover is extremely important, one could certainly look at the full history of these portfolios to understand better. It is also interesting to note that in current period, money is easy, but small cap is not doing better than large cap. That is expected, given current uncertain situation. Investment is a statistical process, thus, the whatever strategies will not be able to 100% correct. What matters is that it should be statistically correct: meaning the expected return should do well given enough time (samples). What matters more is that in a portfolio design, when a particular thesis does not turn out to be correct (which should be surely expected), the damage is not serious. In this case, even though small cap under performs large cap, it still delivers positive returns, thus, no tremendous harm done to your portfolio.
As to who did it, Ned Davis and Ford equity have done lot of research in various periods on these. What distinguishes ValidFi is that we have this continuously monitored in a cohesive platform to allow up to date study, combining with others in a portfolio and comparison with others etc.
What conclusions can we draw? That deserves another article to explain that. We will do that at some other time.
Portfolio Building: Risks, Not Risk [View article]
I absolutely agree that MVO is just a mathematical tool that was overused/over promoted for marketing and (UChicago's) religious purpose. It is how to properly use it matters.
For example, on top of MVO, Black and Litterman have proposed a method to incorporate investor's outlook/estimate. Furthermore, in a simplistic manner, one could opt to use other ways to estimate covariances instead of getting that from recent history.
It is also important that as a TOOL, one could apply MVO to a set of time series objects instead of just those traditional static assets. An example would be to use various strategies (on asset classes) such as long/short etc. as the inputs.
Budgeting risk factors could be the first pre-processing step to tilt the MVO. Moreover, an overall and weights on individual assets could be capped to limit the 'fat tail' risk. A post processing step could be added to limit such overall exposure.
Anyway, if you are a practitioner, you choose tools handy smartly to handle the problems, not blindly trusting the output, let alone treating such MPT as the godsend. No wonder Buffett once criticized the EMT(Efficient Market Theory) academics, for that I quoted his Berkshire Hathaway's 2007 annual shareholder letter here:
"And what did members of the academic community do when they were exposed to this new and important evidence? Unfortunately, they reacted in all-too-human fashion: Rather than opening their minds, they closed their eyes. To my knowledge no business school teaching EMT made any attempt to study Walter’s performance and what it meant for the school’s cherished theory.
Instead, the faculties of the schools went merrily on their way presenting EMT as having the certainty of scripture. Typically, a finance instructor who had the nerve to question EMT had about as much chance of major promotion as Galileo had of being named Pope.
Tens of thousands of students were therefore sent out into life believing that on every day the price of every stock was “right” (or, more accurately, not demonstrably wrong) and that attempts to evaluate businesses – that is, stocks – were useless. Walter meanwhile went on overperforming, his job made easier by the misguided instructions that had been given to those young minds. After all, if you are in the shipping business, it’s helpful to have all of your potential competitors be taught that the earth is flat.
Maybe it was a good thing for his investors that Walter didn’t go to college. "
On Oct 06 08:59 AM Living4Dividends wrote:
> > > Good point ! For example, bonds have done very well (nearly equal > to stocks) over past 28 years. I am sure that the MVO heavily overweights > bonds due to recent performance. > > But rather than attacking or blaming MPT for this shortcoming, perhaps > the fault lies at the person using the MVO. They use too short of > a time period of data. > > As well, the fault lies in the MVO itself. These are tricky beasts > that operate under the "Garbage in garbage out" principle. A properly > tamed MVO can give good results. > > On Oct 05 06:33 PM ff4444 wrote:
The Street's 10 Dividend Stocks Challenged by Seeking Alpha Readers [View article]
We are trying to measure the impact of a selection and use that to find the best ideas.
There is certainly wisdom in the counsel of many
I think it is great that there is such sharing of ideas.
6 ETF Permanent Income Portfolio [View article]
We don't claim and don't intend to claim that all these pp varieties will surpass pp.
Regardless, the pp four corner framework is such a wonderful and simple foundation for investors of all sorts to base on, that we believe in firmly.
Comparing 22 Buffett and Lynch Type Stocks With Dividend ETFs [View article]
These articles are published with the goal of quantifying the stock portfolios recommended by magazines and other luminaries so that it's possible to measure whether they are any good at all.
Once these portfolios have been created, you can go back to it and see how it's doing.
We have published tactical and strategic asset allocation definitions -- we put a link in to explain it but SA takes it out.
This is it:
www.myplaniq.com/LTISy...
Anyway, it is unlikely this will satisfy you -- but at least it doesn't cost you anything!
Gold, U.S. Equities, Long-Term Treasuries and Cash Make for Uncanny Retirement Portfolio [View article]
Swensen 6 Asset Class Lazy Retirement Portfolio Review [View article]
MyPlanIQ is not affiliated with any broker, any mutual fund company or in fact, with any financial product company. We don't get paid by any financial institutions and we derive no commission whatsoever from the articles we publish.
We agree that ETFs or CEFs can be good vehicles to implement the portfolios we mentioned. We will furnish such plans in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.
John at MyPlanIQ
Going Global in Fixed Income Bond ETF Investing [View article]
Comparing the Fool's 5 Best Stocks to a Dividend Heavy ETF Portfolio [View article]
The point of the exercise is to track portfolios that are recommended and provide some insight. We don't originate the portfolios, we are just tracking them.
These Dividend Stocks Disappoint [View article]
The Sharpe ratio or Sharpe index or Sharpe measure or reward-to-variability ratio is a measure of the excess return per unit of risk in an investment asset or a trading strategy, named after William Forsyth Sharpe.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I hope that helps.
Dividend Triplers and Volatility [View article]
Does Greene's 'Gone Fishin' Portfolio' Stand the Test of Time? [View article]
I would be interested to have the original proponents of the portfolios comment as to whether they would recommend another strategy with what they know now.
I think that retirement investing is a major crisis and you simply can't fire and forget your retirement investing. I had buy and hold through the downturn and even with financial advice, I lost as much as the market. I wish I had been more involved then!!
I would welcome comments from others.
High Dividend ETFs: Preferred Stocks Down but Not Out [View article]
Cash Is King for PIMCO's El-Erian and Global Multi-Asset Portfolios [View article]
I absolutely agree that PIMCO does not take dramatic big swings on their actual allocation. However, even among stocks, for example, there are some which are high beta and some are low beta. Some may happen to correlate with inflation fear more than the others. So for example, if PIMCO holds more low beta stocks (such as consumer staples), we will report lower percentage in this case. Even worse (or better), if its majority stock holdings are correlating to international equities more (though they are US stocks), we will report the fund has some percentages of international equities.
All in all, we are reporting how their portfolio internals correlate with asset indices, not the actual holdings. It is really for us to understand the portfolio behavior, not the actual holdings.
Does a Four-Asset ETF Portfolio Beat a Three-Asset ETF Portfolio? [View article]
I think that within reasonable limits, the more asset classes and the more choices within those asset classes, the better will be the returns.
Let me cite two examples:
www.myplaniq.com/LTISy...
TD Ameritrade recently announced their 101 commission free ETFs. These ETF's were chosen by Morningstar and provide portfolio building capabilities that are very good.
www.myplaniq.com/LTISy...
The Shell 401K plan doesn't have great funds but there are so many of them, that we can find good choices in all categories.
CAVEATS
1. The more funds that are available, the harder it can be -- or the more work -- for you to find the best ones. With an application like MPIQ, this is automated but if you are not using an application to do the work for you, more choices can be confusing. Most people will stick with what they know.
2. I don't know if there is such a thing as over extending the asset classes. We are sticking to areas that have been researched and proven so we are not making any comment on how many is too many.
3. The more asset classes and funds you have, the more trading you will do. That has implications on tax, commissions, effort and there is the danger of over trading -- i.e. you don't give an asset a chance to recover.
4. Over the longer time horizon, TAA has proven to be effective because there are ups and downs and TAA limits downsides. We can see that 2010 was an equities year and SAA beat TAA.
So, in conclusion (sorry to be long winded), within reasonable limits of asset classes and funds, the more choices you have, the better opportunity for higher risk adjusted returns.
Our limit is six asset classes. We see good returns on that. Depending on what new research turns up, we may add others.
I hope that this helps.
By the way, an expert user can always experiment with our system to try out additional classes and see the returns.
A Well-Balanced Wealth Management Investment Strategy [View article]
We started ValidFi with a goal to answer many of your questions.
The portfolios are setup to back test further back to whatever data we have in hand at the moment. For large/small cap, we will create separate portfolios to test out. Same for gold/long treasury bond. Right now, there is a model portfolio which tests the combination of both. The combination of the both runs from 1/1/1997 to present. For large/small cap, we could extend further back to 1987 or so, I believe.
The other major feature ValidFi has is to 'LIVE' monitor these strategies. Thus, you will see the portfolios with these strategies are updated daily, so that users could study various periods up to now.
Your question on what periods does it cover is extremely important, one could certainly look at the full history of these portfolios to understand better. It is also interesting to note that in current period, money is easy, but small cap is not doing better than large cap. That is expected, given current uncertain situation. Investment is a statistical process, thus, the whatever strategies will not be able to 100% correct. What matters is that it should be statistically correct: meaning the expected return should do well given enough time (samples). What matters more is that in a portfolio design, when a particular thesis does not turn out to be correct (which should be surely expected), the damage is not serious. In this case, even though small cap under performs large cap, it still delivers positive returns, thus, no tremendous harm done to your portfolio.
As to who did it, Ned Davis and Ford equity have done lot of research in various periods on these. What distinguishes ValidFi is that we have this continuously monitored in a cohesive platform to allow up to date study, combining with others in a portfolio and comparison with others etc.
What conclusions can we draw? That deserves another article to explain that. We will do that at some other time.
Cheers!
Portfolio Building: Risks, Not Risk [View article]
For example, on top of MVO, Black and Litterman have proposed a method to incorporate investor's outlook/estimate. Furthermore, in a simplistic manner, one could opt to use other ways to estimate covariances instead of getting that from recent history.
It is also important that as a TOOL, one could apply MVO to a set of time series objects instead of just those traditional static assets. An example would be to use various strategies (on asset classes) such as long/short etc. as the inputs.
Budgeting risk factors could be the first pre-processing step to tilt the MVO. Moreover, an overall and weights on individual assets could be capped to limit the 'fat tail' risk. A post processing step could be added to limit such overall exposure.
Anyway, if you are a practitioner, you choose tools handy smartly to handle the problems, not blindly trusting the output, let alone treating such MPT as the godsend. No wonder Buffett once criticized the EMT(Efficient Market Theory) academics, for that I quoted his Berkshire Hathaway's 2007 annual shareholder letter here:
"And what did members of the academic community do when they were exposed to this new and important evidence? Unfortunately, they reacted in all-too-human fashion: Rather than opening their minds, they closed their eyes. To my knowledge no business school teaching EMT made any attempt to study Walter’s performance and what it meant for the school’s cherished theory.
Instead, the faculties of the schools went merrily on their way presenting EMT as having the certainty of scripture. Typically, a finance instructor who had the nerve to question EMT had about as much chance of major promotion as Galileo had of being named Pope.
Tens of thousands of students were therefore sent out into life believing that on every day the price of every stock was “right” (or, more accurately, not demonstrably wrong) and that attempts to evaluate businesses – that is, stocks – were useless. Walter meanwhile went on overperforming, his job made easier by the misguided instructions that had been given to those young minds. After all, if you are in the shipping business, it’s helpful to have all of your potential competitors be taught that the earth is flat.
Maybe it was a good thing for his investors that Walter didn’t go to college. "
On Oct 06 08:59 AM Living4Dividends wrote:
>
>
> Good point ! For example, bonds have done very well (nearly equal
> to stocks) over past 28 years. I am sure that the MVO heavily overweights
> bonds due to recent performance.
>
> But rather than attacking or blaming MPT for this shortcoming, perhaps
> the fault lies at the person using the MVO. They use too short of
> a time period of data.
>
> As well, the fault lies in the MVO itself. These are tricky beasts
> that operate under the "Garbage in garbage out" principle. A properly
> tamed MVO can give good results.
>
> On Oct 05 06:33 PM ff4444 wrote: