Category: Alternative Investment Strategy

Nobody likes paying for insurance.  It is intangible as you pay up front for an unknown risk that may or may not materialize.  Many of us feel that we overpay, until we really need it.  It is perhaps not surprising then that many investors spend little effort protecting against sudden and unexpected drops in the […]

All investors know the adage to “buy high and sell low” but few adhere to it.  We can see this with record volume to start July trading coming mostly from retail investors as the S&P reaches another all time high.  Perhaps I have been in the futures industry too long because when things are “too […]

We opined in our last article, “Why Traditional Hedges Fail,” that most traditional hedges had significant weaknesses and did not have many characteristics of a great hedge. Volatility (long positions in VIX futures), while not perfect, has a number of these favorable characteristics for hedging an equity portfolio. The characteristics of an excellent equity hedge […]

Index investing is all the rage now with over a trillion dollars invested in the SPY and VOO ETFs alone.  The expectation is that low fees coupled with broad market exposure is better for your portfolio than an actively managed strategy with higher fees. One could argue that as the components of the indices attract […]

Want to play a “fun” game? Go to Google and type “currency crisis (insert any country name)” and see your results. Luckily for Americans, you will find that the United States is one of the few countries that have avoided this designation so far. As one of my Polish friends who immigrated asked me, “Why […]

An article by Scot Billington, Covenant Capital Management Unfortunately, most traditional hedges fail to deliver in several key areas. Buy and hold investing has been wildly successful since 1982; however, its adherents have had to endure two 50% drawdowns, a 25% down day, and 14 years of zero return. Long-term wealth is significantly impacted by […]

I have spent over a decade in the futures industry so I am accustomed to the blank stare when I tell people what I do. Most immediately assume it is too complicated to even try to understand.  The ironic thing is that we all intuitively understand them already. We trade them all the time. We […]

Market sentiment is a broad term that encompasses the prevailing feeling that investors have about a market.  Measuring this “feeling” can be accomplished in a variety of ways. CNNMoney has a Fear and Greed Index that displays this in a simple format showing when investors are most willing to take on risk or hunker down. […]

Investors are always faced with choices.  My experience tells me that these choices are often driven by simple quirks of human behavior.  Two of these that seem to be big drivers seem to be recency bias and a desire for simplification.  Both of these naturally make us poor investors. For example, in March of 2020 […]