The nice thing about big selloffs is that the lower the market goes today, the higher your future returns go for tomorrow. We have 4Q19 Fed Z.1 data now, which means I can try to roundabout ballpark S&P 500 returns for the next 10 years. As of 12/31/19 this estimate was 2.43%. After making some (very) rough adjustments for recent market moves, it has increased to 7.66% today.

With interest rates as low as they are, and the possibility of negative rates looming on the horizon, I think a 700+ bps equity risk premium probably merits some buying, somewhere. DON’T GO ALL-IN. It is very possible things get worse before they get better. My own strategy has been to focus on the shares of companies that seem inordinately dislocated based on poor liquidity conditions. This is particularly evident in small cap stocks. In the US, these stocks had drawn down approximately 50% prior to the last couple days’ bounce.

Pulling the trigger on these things is not a trivial thing to do. It is uncomfortable knowing that you could be catching falling knives. I am not arguing that people are stupid for being cautious here.

I am, however, arguing that if you have liquidity (also far from trivial), and are willing to be a provider of liquidity in a dislocated market, there are spots where you can be compensated quite well for doing so. In small cap land, there are stocks trading at double-digit discounts to announced, all-cash takeout offers. This makes very little economic sense. Is Google going to bail on its FitBit acquisition because of the coronavirus? Probably not.

Admittedly, my truest investing self is “bottom-feeding contrarian.”

Right now, I think it makes sense more than ever to put money to work in a concentrated, “lottery ticket” portfolio alongside a more conservative core.

I have updated the (corrected) S&P 500 expected return model for the recent 3Q19 Z.1 data release. The good news: it shows a modest increase in the forward 10-year return estimate, to 4.18%. The bad news: this is almost certainly lower today given how US equities have rallied over the last quarter. (12/19/19 EDIT: I hacked together an estimate as of today and it’s about 3.03%)

Now, I don’t think this model is at all useful as a market timing tool. But it is definitely arguing for lower forward-looking return expectations. This is partly why I’ve implemented the leveraged permanent portfolio with a significant portion of my net personal net worth. Make no mistake: there will come a day to be all-in on equities again. You’ll know it because people will be screaming bloody murder and trumpeting the death of buy-and-hold like they did from 2009 to 2012. (Remember this when your friends and/or financial advisor are pitching you on expensive liquid alternatives some day)

I’ve mentioned before that one of the weaknesses of this model is that it isn’t macro-aware. It doesn’t “know” anything about credit or interest rates. The underlying intuition is simply that as an increasing proportion of assets are “financed” by equity, expected equity returns decrease. In a world of very low or even negative interest rates, it’s possible we’ll see a structural shift in investor preferences for equities. In a regime where interest rates stay very low for a very long time, it makes sense for equity valuations to remain elevated. One should not underestimate the persuasive power of No Good Alternatives (I have been guilty of this, personally). Recall that we tried the whole “normalize interest rates” thing in 2018. We didn’t even get to 3% on Fed funds before the Fed backed off.

There are, of course, many possible futures. The three I think most about:

The Great Jihad. This is a situation where the transition back to a multi-polar world order, combined with domestic political divisions, results in wars and violent revolutions. Scary, but not worth thinking about all that much from an investment POV. In this future just focus on staying alive. Don’t sweat the markets. In fact, you might as well go all-in, because you’ll be scooping up assets at steep discounts.

Muddle Through. Here everything just kind of works out. Rates and returns stay low, but policymakers effect a “soft landing” and everything works out. In a world where economies can be run with mechanical precision, this can probably be engineered just fine. That’s not the world we live in, however. We live in a world where economic reality must be made politically palatable. Politically, we seem to be headed to a world that is more hostile toward trade, and where there is strong pushback against policymaking elites. I therefore assign a relatively low probability to muddling through.

Stagflation. This is a situation where we have lower economic growth but higher inflation. This is quite frightening from a financial perspective as you have to invest very differently from what is now conventional wisdom to come through stagflation okay. Avoid bonds and cash, as well as equities without pricing power. Real assets are pretty much the only game in town here. Maybe some alts. Personally, I believe we are close to stagflation today. I am one of those loony Inflation Truthers who believes “real” inflation (as experienced by real people in their daily lives) is higher than the CPI numbers trumpeted in the news, because CPI is restrained by things like hedonic adjustments for the improving quality of goods. But I’ll leave the details for macro wonks to fight over.

You will note that I have omitted an inflationary boom from the list. The reason for this is that developed world demographics do not appear to support much of an inflationary boom. What could change this? Well, obviously population growth could suddenly increase. Or, we could start encouraging lots of immigration (not going to happen in the current political climate–and this can’t work for every country in the world simultaneously, anyway). I don’t think either of those things is particularly likely. But, there is always technology. Historically, it has not been great positioning to be short human ingenuity. Maybe Elon gets us to Mars or somewhere else in the solar system and we start colonizing other planets. Who knows.

So anyway, what’s an investor to do?

Adapt.

I am more and more convinced that the average person or institution’s asset allocation should be managed with a trend following and/or volatility targeting overlay (note that this stuff can also work as a risk management tool in more idiosyncratic portfolios). The point here is not to market time (that is impossible to do profitably as far as I’m concerned). The point is to detect regime changes, and to make sure you end up more or less on the right side of them.

Do not be the guy who is short equities for 10 years into a bull market.

Do not be the gal who goes all-in on equities at the top.

Do not be a permabear, or a permabull.

Be biased toward being long, and biased toward bullishness, but with some sense of proportionality and a framework for risk management. As a saver, or an institution that is more or less a saver, you don’t have to catch every market move to make money. You just have to be roundabout, directionally correct about the relationships between economic growth, inflation and valuations.

Identify the regime you’re in. Then make sure you own the right stuff.

Don’t overthink it.

Over the last couple days I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with David Merkel of The Aleph Blog over differences in our S&P 500 expected returns modes. (Mine was much higher than his). Upon comparing models, I discovered I’d made a huge mistake. I’d essentially included only corporate debt in my calculation, excluding a huge swath of government liabilities from the total figure.

After adjusting my numbers to correct for this, and updating the model, I get a 3.74% expected return for the next 10 years. This is consistent with David’s 3.61% estimate. The small difference that remains is likely down to some minor differences in the time periods we used to estimate our models, as well as the type of S&P 500 return we use in the calculation (I believe David uses the price return and then adjusts for dividends, whereas I simply regress the S&P 500 total return against the “allocation” data).

Previously I’d been referring to my results as “A World of Meh.” I think I’m now comfortable revising that down to “A World of Bleh.” (“Meh” is kind of like an indifferent shrug, while with a “bleh” you are maybe throwing up in your mouth a bit)

I’ll give David the last word here, since I think his take on all this is a nice summary of the quandary investors face these days:

Not knowing what inflation or deflation will be like, it would be difficult to tell whether the bond or stock would be riskier, even if I expected 3.39% from each on average. Given the large debts of our world, I lean to deflation, favoring the bond in this case.

Still, it’s a tough call because with forecast returns being so low, many entities will perversely go for the stocks because it gives them some chance of hitting their overly high return targets. If this is the case, there could be some more room to run for now, but with nasty falls after that. The stock market is a weighing machine ultimately, and it is impossible to change the total returns of the economy. Even if an entity takes more risk, the economy as a whole’s risk profile doesn’t change in the long run.

In the short run it can be different if strongly capitalized entities are taking less risk and and weakly capitalized entities are taking more risk — that’s usually bearish. Vice-versa is usually bullish.

Anyway, give this some thought. Maybe things have to be crazier to put in the top. At least in this situation, bonds and stocks are telling the same story, unlike 1987 or 2000, where bonds were more attractive. Now, alternatives are few.

Today marks the second rebalance of my leveraged permanent portfolio with its volatility (12% target) and trend following overlays. I thought it might be fun to do brief posts on the monthly rebalances going forward, partly to keep myself honest and partly to record for posterity what it “feels like” to be invested this way.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the portfolio is now below its risk target, with a trailing volatility of only 5.16%. So the cash position created at the last rebalance will now go back to work in ex-US equity (most segments of ex-US equity appear to have poked back above their 200-day moving averages). In fact, I need to be fully invested now and will STILL be below my risk target.

The new target portfolio looks like this:

When the leverage employed within NTSX is taken into account, you end up with:

28% S&P 500

19% Laddered Treasuries

32% Gold

4% EM Large Cap

4% EAFE Small Cap

14% EM Small Cap

15% EAFE Large Cap

~116% notional exposure, just shy of 1.2x leverage

Note that the weights of the portfolio as implemented will differ modestly from this “ideal” due to transactional frictions and such. For example, in an ideal world I would reallocate the two small Vanguard positions across the whole portfolio rather than overweight ex-US equity. However, I recently rolled this account over to a new platform and am trying to be mindful of transaction costs. And anyway, if you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’re no doubt familiar with my view that, in the grand scheme of things, these little overweights and underweights don’t materially impact portfolio performance.

Here is updated performance versus the S&P 500 for context as of pixel time:

Despite being so short, it’s an interesting period to look at live performance for the strategy (net of fees and transaction costs) as it exhibits precisely the type of behavior you would expect from backtests of both leveraged and unleveraged permanent portfolios. The portfolio protects well during periods of broad market stress but lags during sharp rallies. Additionally, it’s worth noting that gold has had an exceptional run during this brief period, which is a complete coincidence.

When I first wrote about the permanent portfolio, Adam Butler of ReSolve Asset Management (@GestaltU on Twitter) pointed me to a couple of pieces he’d done on the concept. They are both worth reading:

Permanent Portfolio Shakedown I

Permanent Portfolio Shakedown II

Of particular interest to me was the second piece, which examines a permanent portfolio with a trend following and volatility targeting overlay. As I’ve written before, I am hardwired as a mean reversion guy psychologically. So getting on board with trend following was (and remains) really hard for me. For no good reason other than my own biases, I might add. But I’ve gradually come around to the idea.

The main reason is this: trend following ensures you incorporate market feedback into your investment process. As Jesse Livermore of Philosophical Economics writes in one of his exceptional pieces on trend following:

[T]he strategy has a beneficial propensity to self-correct. When it makes an incorrect call, the incorrectness of the call causes it to be on the wrong side of the total return trend. It’s then forced to get back on the right side of the total return trend, reversing the mistake. This propensity comes at a cost, but it’s beneficial in that prevents the strategy from languishing in error for extended periods of time. Other market timing approaches, such as approaches that try to time on valuation, do not exhibit the same built-in tendency. When they get calls wrong–for example, when they wrongly estimate the market’s correct valuation–nothing forces them to undo those calls. They get no feedback from the reality of their own performances. As a consequence, they have the potential to spend inordinately long periods of time–sometimes decades or longer–stuck out of the market, earning paltry returns.

The permanent portfolio concept works because it combines assets that are essentially uncorrelated across economic and market regimes (Treasury bonds, gold, equities). But within any given regime, assets can remain out of favor for extended periods of time.

Can a trend following and volatility targeting overlay help improve the return profile? I think the above linked blog posts provide compelling evidence that it can.

So I’d like to conduct a live experiment to test this out of sample. With my own money.

As I’ve mentioned before, the core of my portfolio* is now invested in a leveraged permanent portfolio:

35% GLD

32% NTSX

23% VMMSX

10% VINEX

There is nothing magical about either VMMSX or VINEX. These are just residual holdings in an old Roth IRA (we will revisit them in a bit down below). You may also recall that NTSX is allocated 90/60 S&P 500 and laddered Treasury bills. So the overall asset allocation looks like this:

35% Gold

29% S&P 500

19% Laddered Treasury Bonds

23% Emerging Markets

10% Ex-US SMID Cap Equity

(116% notional exposure a.k.a ~1.2x leverage)

The thing that keeps me up at night is the allocation to emerging markets and ex-US SMID cap equity. I am willing to place a bet on these market segments but I am also acutely aware that I could be wrong. Very wrong. For an extended period of time.

And this is where I think a trend and volatility management overlay can help. Rather than put my finger in the air to judge whether to double down or fold my hand, I’ll let feedback from market prices help me adjust the views expressed in my portfolio.

Here’s how it will work:

Step 1: First, check trailing volatility for the entire portfolio. If 12%, do nothing. If greater than 12%, proceed to Step 2. There’s nothing magical about 12%. I’m just trying to pick a high enough target so I’m biased toward remaining fully invested.

Step 2: Check trailing volatility for portfolio assets. For those with 12% or less, do nothing. For those with 12%+, proceed to Step 3.

Step 3: Check each asset’s price against its 200 day moving average. If above the 200 day moving average, do nothing. If below, trim positions to create cash such that overall trailing portfolio volatility falls falls to around 12% (transaction costs and taxes must be taken into account here).

Basically what we’re doing is volatility targeting by taking money from assets with poor price trends. If we were to find ourselves below target on overall volatility, we would check portfolio assets and add cash to the assets with higher volatility and strong price trends.

I ran an initial monthly rebalancing check on 8/21. Unsurprisingly, the portfolio was well above the 12% volatility target, at 17.27%. GLD, VMMSX and VINEX were all well above the 12% threshold. However, GLD is also trading well above its 200 day moving average. Thus, I trimmed significantly from VMMSX and VINEX to add cash and bring trailing volatility back to target. (In an ideal world we would actually risk-balance the portfolio as well, so that each asset held in the portfolio contributed the same amount of volatility. Unfortunately, at least as far as I am aware, I don’t have the tools available to do this in a small account)

You can compare the “before and after” portfolios here.

This is just a rebalancing mechanism for what is, on its own, a fairly well-balanced portfolio. Except here you are favoring the assets that are “working.” We are effectively mean-variance optimizing a highly diversified portfolio over short time horizons. Because we are optimizing more frequently, we are better positioned to adapt to regime changes than we are when using longer time periods.

Here are the results from my leveraged permanent portfolio since May. The timing is completely coincidental, and most definitely favors the permanent portfolio, but I think it’s compelling “live” evidence nonetheless (note that the first overlay-based rebalance did not take place until August 21).

*Ex-401(k). 401(k) investment options are literally the worst.