
Oasis Pond, El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
A relatively quiet week in the US equity markets that still managed to close higher than last week’s close with new intraday highs on Monday and Thursday:
Implied Volatility has settled at an average level of ~17%
Checking on the performance of assets in the Rutherford quiver:
we see that Real Estate and International Equities led the charge with Bonds losing out and US Equities sitting in the middle of the pack.
Unfortunately, the Rutherford Portfolio is not holding International Equities directly although they are represented to some degree through positions in the benchmark AOR fund:
Checking performance we see the following picture:
where, despite the impact of timing/review-date luck, we are matching the performance of the benchmark.
Let’s take a look at current rankings and recommendations from the BHS model:
where we see Buy recommendations for VTI, VNQ and PCY with a Hold recommendation for TLT and discretionary Hold?s for RWX, AGG and DBC. Since I am currently holding VNQ, TLT, DBC and AOR in Tranche 5 (the focus of this week’s review) the first question comes down to whether I should Sell DBC.
As usual I will take a look at the rotation graphs:
where we see DBC heading down and to the left towards the bottom left quadrant. Although in a slightly better position on a longer term basis, note, also, how TLT has looped around and is, maybe, heading in the same direction. VTI and VNQ are showing a shorter term recovery. PCY is sitting in that mess near the origin and not showing any particularly strong movement but, since I ignored a suggested Buy recommendation for this ETF last week and it is still showing as a possible Buy in this week’s recommendations, with a maximum 10 Score rating, I am thinking that I should introduce it in this Tranche 5 adjustment.
Before moving on we’ll just check on recommendations from a rotation model:
where we see AOR, VTI, VNQ and RWX as the Buy recommendations. RWX is not recommended as a Buy from the BHS model due to the 4 asset maximum holding limit used – but it does have a maximum 10 Score rating and does show as a Buy if this limit is changed to 5 assets.
Based on the above, my adjustments this week (in Tranche 5) will be to Sell the 286 shares of DBC and 37 shares of TLT held in this Tranche and to use the cash generated to Buy 145 shares of RWX and 200 shares of PCY:
this will give me a little more diversity in the portfolio and, by holding my current position in AOR, I am still covering the VTI Buy recommendations and the TLT Hold recommendation.
With 1.65 SD TSLOs in place I will keep my portfolio risk to ~4%.
David
How Risky is Your Portfolio? – Another Perspective
Constructing a “Core” Investment Portfolio : Part 2 – Buy And Hold with Periodic Adjustments