Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Newsletter from Dec. '07

The objective of managing your investment account should be: Don't lose in down markets so it is easier to gain in Up markets. The Bible refers to this as "Occupation". You protect what you've already gained and then go out to get more. Militarily you are to never give up what you've already conquered on the promise of gaining more in the future.
Following is a newsletter I sent to my clients in December of 2007, which was near the top of the market. I was notifying them we were going to begin a conservative approach because I thought we could be moving into a recession.
The Market. . . According to John

No Short Term Views

The market was in an overbought condition last week, but the latest pullback has fixed that. At this point, the next short term move is a toss-up. This suits our hedge position perfectly. Yesterday, for example, the Dow was down over 170 points. Most of our acccounts, however, were pretty close to break-even. Today, the market was slightly up, but we enjoyed a very nice increase in account values.

Why hedge? When the market hasn't shown a clear sign what it is going to do next, it would be nice to have positions that will do BETTER than the market if it advances. Since it may also go the other way, it would be nice to have positions that will make us money there as well. By effectively buying positions that help offset each other, we are taking a "Market Neutral" stance. If we are lucky enough to do it right, in an increasing market, our out-performers will beat the market enough that they will pull our hedge positions along well enough to at least match the upward return of the market.

If the market decides to go south, our hedge positions will increase in value and hopefully our stock positions won't go down too dramatically, thus decreasing our overall account value less than the market declines. Properly executed, our hedged portfolio should give us major market return with substantially decreased volatility. The perfect answer for a time when the market is giving us no short term direction.

Intermediate Term: Down

An ominous scenario is potentially setting up. If the market decides to pull back further and break the lows it just set a couple weeks ago (remember the last low broke the lows set this summer) and then immediately spikes up 200 to 400 points -- then look out. This is the pattern that historically has preceeded crashes. I have no idea if this will follow through, but I will definitely be watching.

In the end of November, the Dow broke a major support level before bouncing back (see #1 in Figure 1). The piercing of this major support level changed our long term trend from positive to negative. Now, we would expect any upward movements in the market to top out lower than the high of the last upward movement (notice last top in Figure 1 is lower than previous top). On the same hand, the next low should be lower than the last. Lower highs and lower lows are the definition of a down trend.

Figure 1

Let's look at how the Dow acted through the last recession and compare how it is setting up now. Figure 2 shows how the major lows consistently broke below the low prior to it. These are numbered from 1 to 7. The highs were initially trying to go higher, but were turned away at the previous highs. Eventually they began to top out lower than the previous highs.



Figure 2

Recession Watch

Partial reason for the nice bounce off the support levels last week were news from the Fed. They hyped further liquidity to the financial markets by buying back $40 billion of treasuries (known as "repos"). Unfortunately, the rest of the story is that these were coming due anyway this week. $39 billion of repos were due and will be simply getting a different maturity date. The market finds this out and we get a couple major down days back to back. We've heard the heralding of hundreds of billions being pumped into the market to prop up the ailing financial system. In all reality, only about 18 billion has been added.

The Fed is doing us a great disservice. They are inflating our currency at rates that haven't been seen for 30 years. This results in DECREASING it's value. This causes the economic hangover to be worse when they slow down the inflating process. The opposite of inflating is depressing. Yes, depressions are the natural product of wild, out of control periods of inflating. Historically, the Fed won't let the cycle take it's full course and it will begin inflating again before a full blown depression occurs, causing a mild depression or "recession".
Where do we go from here?

I truly believe we will be taking off long positions soon and replace them with further shorts such as SKK, SKF and MZZ.

Small/Mid Cap Component





The small/mid cap component represents half of our 401k management program. The above returns represent the return you would have experienced in the Fidelity Low Priced Stock Fund had you not used our system vs. if you DID use our system. The period of time represented is the top of the market in Oct '07 until today, Oct 7 '09.

The way our system works:

  • Determine which investments in your 401k represent the small / mid cap asset class.
  • When we let you know the market is good, invest half of your 401k into one or more of these funds.
  • When the status of the market changes, we will notify you. At this point you would switch the small/mid cap funds into the money market.

The entire idea is to protect your 401k in bad markets and capitalize in the good markets.

This system has done exactly that. You don't have to wait years just to break even after a bad market. This system allows you to exercise good judgement as it pertains to your 401k.

Monday, October 5, 2009

401k Allocation



Our 401k allocation system has two components. One is International / Emerging Markets and the other Small / Mid Cap. The chart above is a history of Fidelity Emerging Markets Fund utilizing our International/Emerging component. The line depicts the Fund by itself from October 2007 through today. It is down over 40% in this period of time. The line is red when the system told you to be in cash (money market) and green when it told you to be invested in the emerging markets fund. Had you done as it recommended your investment would have looked like the followingchart:



The flat periods depict while you were in cash and the jagged periods while you were invested in the emerging markets fund. Had you simply held onto the fund you would be down over 40% today but had you utilized this system you would be up over 50%. What a huge difference.

This system was designed in the mid '90s so the results are real. Not backtested.

If you're interested in looking further at this service goto http://www.ewatch401k.com or simply click on the rescue helicopter in the left margin.