Trading Like the Hedge Funds Do
With the market starting the year quite well — S&P 500 was up 4% as of Wednesday’s close — we might be tempted to assume thatĂ‚Â Ă‚Â the rest of 2012 will go as smoothly, and start allocating higherĂ‚Â Ă‚Â percentage of our portfolios to U.S. equities. After the past year,Ă‚Â Ă‚Â which resulted in zero returns for the S&P 500, who can blame us?Ă‚Â Ă‚Â It’s also an election year, so things we …
2011 In Review
Last week I wrote about possible asset allocation for this year. This week I would like to review last year sector performance and remind that a prudent investor wants to have proper asset and sector allocation instead of picking individual stocks. Last year was a year that we will not forget, the volatility was very high and correlations among asset classes increased dramatically. The S&P 500 was dead even for …
Portfolio Selection for 2012
To say that this was an interesting year is certainly an understatement. To briefly restate the well-known issues, the lackluster US economic recovery, lack of direction from Washington, Arab spring, increasingly aggressive stance against Iran, Greek debt and Euro troubles, are just to list a few. We should probably refer to the “interesting” year as what the Chinese culture refers to “interesting”, meaning it is challenging or troublesome. With high …
Lessons From the Oracle Plunge
What a day Oracle (ORCL) had Wednesday. Here was a seemingly bullet-proof company, with a great CEO (unless you ask his competitors), continuously growing internally and with insatiable appetite for acquiring competitors — and the stock was hammered on a wide earnings miss. Before this occurred, Oracle probably appeared to be an airtight investment. After all, what else could an investor want in a stock? In my opinion, however — …
Dynamic Risk Allocation
Putnam Investments came out with a new fund last month, called Dynamic Risk Allocation Fund (PDREX). The fund “pursues total return like a traditional balanced fund, but with a better balance of risk. This investment approach is called Risk Parity. Rather than letting equities dominate, the risk is spread more evenly across a flexible variety of sources.” It is an interesting approach and it touches several key portfolio investment …
Alternative Strategies Allocation
Last week my partner and I participated in the webinar about Alternative Investment strategies and how to position them in your portfolio. We also discussed the types of alternative strategies that are out there. We also talked about what is commonly called the Endowment Model and below is the performance of the Harvard Management Company, which manages the endowment of Harvard University and I see that they have excellent …
Anatomy of a Sector Play
To say that it has been interesting couple of months would be the height of understatement. September brought us a negative 7.18% return, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, which amounted to negative 10.04% for the year through September.
Breaking Down Sector Allocation | ETF Profits
Breaking Down Sector Allocation | ETF Profits. Breaking Down Sector Allocation By Alex Gurvich Oct 13, 2011 | 10:30 AM EDT 0 Comments Stock quotes in this article: SPY , xlb , xlf , XLI , xly , xlk , XLP , XLU , XLV , xle At the beginning of last month, I wrote about a potential short-term rally that could be in the making — this was …
Accessing Uncorrelated Returns
We just love high returns, it’s a fact, and we love anything that goes up. We simply love when our portfolio, whether due to our own analysis or simply luck just goes up. We get an even bigger high if the portfolio actually beats the market (or an index), this is the ultimate gratification. Of course there is no free lunch and when the portfolio goes downs, it usually follows …