April 6, 2020: Long Term Stock Market Timing Since 1871 Revisited
by MyPlanIQ | Apr 7, 2020 | 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.
Regular AAC (Asset Allocation Composite), SAA and TAA portfolios are always rebalanced on the first trading day of a month. the next re-balance will be on Friday May 1, 2020.
Please note: As of March 1, 2020, we officially phased out our old rebalance calendar for both SAA and TAA. They are now always rebalanced on the first trading day of a month.
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.
Long Term Stock Market Timing Since 1871 Revisited
It’s one of our core beliefs that a sensible long term stock market timing strategy can reasonably improve investment returns and dramatically reduce risk. We have regularly reviewed a simple 10-month simple moving average based timing strategy over S&P 500 index. For the recent review, please see April 24, 2017: The Long Term Stock Market Timing Return Since 1871.
It’s certainly interesting to look at the updated data in light of the recent market stress induced by the coronavirus pandemic.
Latest Data
A few words on the data: we take S&P 500 composite data from Shiller’s famous site and among the S&P 500 monthly data (dividend, price), we perform a 10-month moving average over the composite’s total return series: when the S&P 500 total return is above its moving average, it invests 100% in the index, otherwise, it just retains the previous month’s value (that means it derives 0 interest from cash generated from selling S&P 500). Technically, this strategy is different from a pure S&P 500 price based as it relies on its total returns. This strategy actually underestimates returns in some meaningful way: in a real world implementation, when the index is under its 10-month average, one can at least invest in cash (i.e. money market) or better yet, invests in a bond fund such as an intermediate Treasury bond fund or better yet, invest in a good fixed income strategy such as those on our Fixed Income page when not holding S&P 500 index.
