I had never expected the leveraged permanent portfolio concept to be tested so dramatically, so soon after beginning this experiment. The speed of the coronavirus-induced drawdown in financial markets has been absolutely breathtaking. Truly a punch in the face. Through 3/20/20, my leveraged permanent portfolio has drawn down materially, though to a lesser extent than global equities. It has performed much like a 60/40 portfolio in these conditions, though much of this is actually attributable to the inclusion of ex-US equity in the allocation (a US-only variant would be down about 10%).

In the midst of the chaos, I made an important discretionary decision last week. I liquidated the entire GLD position and took it to cash well ahead of the next monthly rebalancing check (due 4/1/20).
Market conditions had deteriorated significantly, and there was a period where essentially all financial assets had become correlated (equities, Treasuries, gold). This increase in correlations is THE existential threat to the permanent portfolio and in my view it MUST be managed. There are basically two ways of doing this: 1) hedge, or 2) take a portion of the portfolio to cash. I opted for #2, and liquidated both the gold and a small residual emerging markets equity position.
Current allocation (based on a full lookthrough of NTSX’s exposures):
33% Cash
27% S&P 500 Futures
18% Laddered Treasury Futures
17% Large Cap ex-US Equity
16% Small Cap ex-US Equity
(78% notional exposure; 60% notional equity exposure)
There is an argument for reducing exposure further. For example, my Twitter friend @breakingthemark runs a somewhat similar strategy with a weekly rebalancing cadence, which has delivered extremely impressive performance. His strategy is tuned to respond more quickly to crashes, and is currently at 60% cash. I expect at 4/1/20 I will be adding more cash, as well as rebalancing some equity exposure back into gold.
* Differences between the total (time-weighted) and personal (dollar-weighted) returns are attributable to the timing of trades, as well as the fact that I reduced the overall size of this portfolio to opportunistically redeploy capital into my “lottery ticket” portfolio bucket during this period.