A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[BowlerBob]

Allen,

I've mentioned it before, but you might look at "The Ivy Portfolio", by Mebane Faber for ideas. He had worked for the Harvard Endowment Fund and, in this book, gives examples of three portfolios which reflect the kind of thinking that goes into making investment allocations at that level.

The three portfolios are made up of readily available ETFs, but are scaled to allow for various sized accounts -- one contains 5 ETFs, another contains 10 ETFs, and the third has 15 ETFs. In the book, he adds another factor to the process by putting a 10 month SMA on a monthly graph of each ETF in the portfolio, and is then Invested or in Cash for that portion of the portfolio, dependent on whether the Price of the ETF is above or below the SMA.

You can see an illustration of this at the website run by Doug Short, The Ivy Portfolio Signals. On the last trading day of each month, he gives you the ETFs of the "5 ETF Portfolio", and the signal status of each. He also gives another box with the same information, but using a 12 month SMA, instead of the 10 month SMA. Since these portfolios are "managed" once a month, there should be no difficulty substituting AIM for the SMAs.

The concept, of course, is very similar to Tom's links to "The Ultimate Portfolio". I mention it because of the listing of specific ETFs and because it is "scaled" to accounts of differing proportions.

Regards,

Bob