Global Markets

Decreasing VIX 20 Strike 10/18/2023 Long Call to 1% Taking Profits on Our VIX Call (VIX 20 Strike 10/18/2023) With VIX almost hitting an intraday level of 30 today, we’re trimming our VIX long call option to 1% of the portfolio at a price of $7.30 relative to our entry price of $5.50. We’re booking […]

Increasing TLT’s allocation from 26% to 35% Increasing GLD’s allocation from 5% to 15% Closing IYT, XLK, XLY Adding to Recession Bets (TLT, GLD) The bank run on Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) and rise in the unemployment rate reported at the end of last week triggered fears that the Fed’s rate hikes are finally taking […]

Taking Profits on Bitcoin We’ve had Bitcoin (BTC) as a position in our model portfolio since we launched it back in late-September 2022 as a high beta bet on equities. Since launching the portfolio, Bitcoin is up about 22%, outperforming the S&P 500’s rise of about 10%. In 2023 Bitcoin is up nearly 40% against […]

Taking Profits in Growthy Sectors Back in mid-December we mentioned that the down beaten growth sectors would stage a comeback in 2023. Tech (XLK) and consumer discretionary (XLY) are big growth exposures in our portfolio, giving our portfolio a growth-tilt. Growth stocks featured stellar returns in January, outperforming value stocks by more than 7 percentage […]

Cash is Now an Attractive Asset Class Following up on our last Macro Note, where we downgraded our S&P 500 year-end target to 3,500, our first change to the model portfolio consists of raising our cash allocation (BIL) by 10 pp. BIL is a 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF we use for allocating to cash. Given […]

Back in June we laid out our thesis on why oil prices would fall and drive disinflation. In our last Macro Note we detailed how falling gasoline prices have driven the weakening CPI this year. In an article in August, we reiterated our view that oil was overvalued, as found by our model. We assigned […]

Here’s the video version of the article: Summary Expanding on our thesis of dollar weakening, we’re adding Korean stocks (EWY) to our model portfolio. We see them as optimal bets on further weakness in the greenback and China’s reopening. Since the early-1970s, the dozen episodes that witnessed a falling dollar saw emerging market stocks outperform […]