Finally, some action!

If you are reading this blog you probably know that February was a wild month in the financial markets. So how did the leveraged permanent portfolio fare?

My verdict is “good, not great.”

In the last rebalance post I asked the question: how does this portfolio break?

Answer: correlations go to 1 in a crisis.

Ironically (the markets do have an uncomfortable habit of throwing this stuff right back in your face), this is precisely what we saw in February in terms of the relationship between equities and gold. GLD finished the month down slightly. However, the monthly number obscures a sharp selloff that occurred in the last couple days of the month. Why did it happen?

I don’t know that anyone knows for sure (if any of you are traders or market makers with special insight, please leave a comment!). My personal hypothesis is that this was a function of investors rebalancing portfolios, taking down gross exposure and getting margin calls. Gold in particular has had a tremendous run over the last 8 months or so. Since I started running this portfolio, GLD is up 23%, while the S&P 500 has returned 2.77% and the BBgBarc Aggregate Bond Index nearly 9%.

Portfolios with a static allocation to gold are probably overweight it. And if you need to sell something for whatever reason, what makes the most sense to sell?

This is the kind of “real-world” trading activity that takes correlations to 1 in a crisis environment. And this portfolio is certainly vulnerable to it, as we saw in February (albeit to a relatively mild degree). It’s why volatility and trend are used as overlays for risk management.

Incidentally, the one-year lookback I use didn’t flag a need to add cash to the portfolio.* A one-month lookback would have, with trailing one-month volatility of about 15%. Equity exposure would have been trimmed to add the cash, with most equity market segments having crashed through their 200-day moving averages in February.

Why do I not use a one-month lookback? Originally, I did. However, I became concerned that such a short lookback period might be too sensitive to very short-term shocks, whereas the strategy is intended as a strategic allocation more geared toward navigating changes in market regimes.

Candidly, I’m not sure this is the right decision.

But we’ll see.

 

* Astute readers may notice that the portfolio weights in this update differ slightly from those in the previous update. There are two reasons for this. First, I trimmed and rebalanced an overweight to ex-US equity exposure that had crept in. Second, yesterday I sold some of the gold and NTSX exposure to make some purchases in my individual stock portfolio. If you’ve been following these updates since the beginning you may recall that I pair this strategy with a concentrated, high-risk, 10(ish) stock equity portfolio.

With January over I ran the latest leveraged permanent portfolio rebalance check. Still in good shape from 12% volatility limit perspective. Relative performance versus the S&P 500 has diminished since 4Q18 rolled off the lookback period. But it remains quite strong versus a Global 60/40 comp.

Actual realized performance from my implementation:

January is an interesting month because it demonstrates the diversifying power of uncorrelated assets (gold, Treasury futures in NTSX) in the face of macroeconomic event risk. In this case, coronavirus.

Recall that the whole purpose of this approach is to be insulated from unexpected macroeconomic or geopolitical shocks without having to predict anything. So far we’ve had two out-of-backtest opportunities to test this: 1) trade war anxieties in August 2019, and 2) coronavirus. In both instances, the strategy has performed as expected.

Which I suppose raises an interesting question: how would you “break” this strategy?

The strategy breaks if equities, Treasuries and gold become highly correlated in a period of sharply negative performance. It is difficult to imagine what would cause correlations to change in this way. I tend to believe it would be some kind of end of the world scenario such as nuclear war, suspension of private property ownership, or zombie apocalypse. I’m not sure portfolios can or should be built with such extreme scenarios in mind.

But anything is possible.

And that is why we set a volatility threshold for the portfolio. If pairwise correlations between equities, Treasuries and gold go to one, and the world has not ended, we would almost certainly see a sharp spike to overall portfolio volatility. At 12% portfolio volatility, we would effectively begin to be “stopped out” of risk assets, and would have to add cash to bring the portfolio back below the 12% max volatility threshold. In theory, if the world were truly turned upside down, this would give us the opportunity to re-allocate to other asset classes that are “working” in the new regime.