We’ve taken a long journey together through the world of Geometric Balancing, traveling through some deep concepts together: We’ve learned about the geometric return and why it’s all that matters. We’ve acknowledged that the investing returns look mostly random. We’ve explored why rebalancing improves returns by moving them from the geometric to the higher arithmetic…
Month: September 2020
Portfolio on 9.25.20
Total for the week down 0.89%, including Monday before the rebalance. Mild changes today. It bounced today between staying with the same portfolio and this small adjustment. On September 25th, the strategy rebalanced to: 36% SPY , 48% TLT , 16% GLD On a good note, since my last update to the code, I haven’t…
Portfolio on 9.21.20
Portfolio composition changed a lot today, especially in bonds and gold. Correlations on bonds and stocks dropped further and volatility on gold and stocks increased. So under the plan to try and stay “in balance”, there needs to be an update today. The portfolio moved from acting like the permanent portfolio, towards a risk parity…
Portfolio on 9.18.20
Down almost a quarter of a percent for the week. Interestingly, cash fell out of the portfolio today. Correlations imply bonds and gold may provide a bit more protection now, so the cash comes back into risky assets. It’s still nearly evenly balanced though, indicating there still isn’t much conviction of what will happen, just…
The Certainty of Death and Taxes
Benjamin Franklin famously said “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. In investing I think the proper quote would read: “In investing nothing can be said to be certain, except Fees and Taxes” We’ll get to the fees part in a future post, but for now let’s tackle…
Portfolio on 9.11.20
Down again for the week. The proper week is a little better than the -1.3% in table below, as that’s covering 6 days since the last rebalance. This portfolio is very “permanent portfolio-ish”, with nearly equal weights off all 4 assets. In a way, it’s saying to be prepared for anything, as its hard to…
What Four Wise Investors Teach Us About Geometric Balancing
Does Geometric Balancing have the potential to become extreme? Does it ever call for a portfolio that’s unjustified, or way outside conventional thought? Sometimes the portfolio will be “wrong”, and when it is should you fear the consequences? I’ve spend hours thinking about this, and came to an interesting conclusion. I think of the question this…
Rebalance Frequency
The violent market moves last Thursday produced a dramatic change in the Geometric Balancing portfolio, which is why I rebalanced mid-week. Rebalancing mid-week is the one part of my strategy which isn’t 100% system based, although that will change going forward. I’ll explain why in this post, and also discuss why I rebalance when I…
Portfolio on 9.3.20
Its very likely I’m going to rebalance later today. I discussed in August of last year, how I’m open to mid week rebalances when a position moves more than a 10% as it provides a bit of bridge between the weekly portfolio and a more frequent rebalancing schedule. Well as of now (about 11:00 AM…
Kelly Investing is About Slope
I left you hanging a few weeks ago, and it’s time to pick the thread back up. In my prior post I explained why factors of safeties are important in engineering and equated the factor of safety to using partial Kelly in investing. But I didn’t explain how to use partial Kelly. What I’m about…