April 30, 2018: Momentum Investing Review

by | May 1, 2018 | Asset-Allocation, Bonds, Economy, Feature, Gold, Headline, Income, Inv, Investments, IRA, Markets, Mutual-Funds, newsletter, Portfolios, Retirement

Re-balance Cycle Reminder All MyPlanIQ’s newsletters are archived here.

For regular SAA and TAA portfolios, the next re-balance will be on Monday, May 7, 2017. You can also find the re-balance calendar for 2017 on ‘Dashboard‘ page once you log in.

As a reminder to expert users: advanced portfolios are still re-balanced based on their original re-balance schedules and they are not the same as those used in Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation (SAA and TAA) portfolios of a plan.

Please note that we now list the next re-balance date on every portfolio page.

Momentum Investing Review

We periodically looked at the performance of momentum investing strategies at various levels. Last time, we looked at this in June 12, 2017: A Mixed Bag Performance of Momentum Investing. In this newsletter, let’s review how these portfolios/funds have recently fared. 

Again, here is the taxonomy of momentum based investing strategies:  

  • m1: A group of individual stocks such as Dow Jones 30 or Nasdaq 100 etc. — Can be Effective, but volatile. 
  • m2: A group of industrial stock funds such as Fidelity’s famous Fidelity Select funds. – Can be Effective, but volatile. 
  • m3: A group of stock sector funds such as SPDR’s S&P sector ETFs such as SPDR Select Energy (XLE) etc. – Can be Effective, but volatile. 
  • m4: A group of stock style funds such as Russell large, mid and small cap stock ETFs. – Effective and comparable risk. 
  • m5: single stock index (fund) buy/sell decision. – Fickle though might be on par with buy and hold. 
  • m6: A group of diversified and somewhat uncorrelated asset classes such as stocks, bonds, real estates (REITs) and their minor asset classes such as long term bonds, international bonds, gold etc. – Effective and lower risk.

Furthermore, at MyPlanIQ, we always advocate the momentum driven strategy at asset allocation level, or m6 in the above categories. This is what our  Tactical Asset Allocation(TAA) strategy is based on.

Momentum stocks continue to do well

It turns out that until recently, stock level momentum investing has paid off (as of 4/27/2018):

Ticker/Portfolio NameYTD
Return**		1Yr AR3Yr AR5Yr AR10Yr AR
PIE (PowerShares DWA Emerging Markets Mom ETF)1.2%26.4%3.8%1.2%0.1%
EEM (iShares MSCI Emerging Markets)0.3%20.5%4.5%4.5%1.7%
AMOMX (AQR Momentum L)3.7%18.3%9.7%12.8% 
PDP (PowerShares DWA Momentum ETF)2.9%16.3%6.9%11.5%7.6%
MTUM (iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor)4.0%27.8%16.1%17.1% 
SPY (SPDR S&P 500 ETF)0.7%14.3%10.5%13.3%9.0%
AIMOX (AQR International Momentum L)2.8%17.9%4.5%4.3% 
EFA (iShares MSCI EAFE)0.9%14.1%4.7%5.8%2.4%
ASMOX (AQR Small Cap Momentum L)2.8%14.9%8.1%11.6% 
IWM (iShares Russell 2000)1.5%10.9%9.0%12.2%9.5%

**YTD: Year to Date (not annualized)

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