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ls7550

01/14/10 9:20 AM

#31305 RE: ls7550 #31304

Found a copy of your spreadsheet LC.

From a cursory glance its similar to Ladder with Mebane's timing - except using W%R whereas Mebane uses 10 month sma (similar to 200 day moving average) timing.

With Ladder, which a log stochastic type measure of

( log(current) - log(bottom) ) / ( log(top) - log(bottom) )

you get a visual feel for the overall whole.

For example say I wanted to apply Ladder individually to each of Mebane's domestic, foreign, REIT, commodities and bonds, and have 20% initial allocation to each. For the domestic stock component I might use the FT100 and relative to the current 5500 price I might decide that two consecutive halvings down to 0.25 of that = 1375 is my lower boundary (100% all in stock), at which point I note that the dividend yield for the FT100 would be around 12% type levels (i.e. around historic extreme's). Given the bottom, current and log stochastic value of 0.8 (20% stock) I can calculate a Ladder top of 7778.

Having worked that I can then use Ladder to identify how much would be traded ($ bought or sold) at say 7% price step intervals and for $100,000 total fund that's $3905. A cycle of 7% generates $273 gross gain (around $250 net gain after two trading costs are incurred). From historical reference I see an average of 3.1 such 7% cycles each year, so I now know that such a ladder would generate around 3.1 x 250 = $775 net (rebalance) profit in the average year. Relative to the $20,000 average at risk that's 3.875%. Relative to the whole its 0.775%.

Having established the domestic stock ladder I can repeat for foreign stocks, commodities, REIT and Bonds. Each having 20% of the whole initial stock exposure and 80% virtual cash reserve (that's actually invested in the other components).

As generally Mebane's has low draw-downs, then the cash reserve is in effect stable, albeit not actually invested in cash. And across the set a 3.875% rebalance gain on average is achieved each year relative to the total fund value. That however assumes that all the components had similar volatility etc. In practice bonds trade less frequently (but equally gold tends to trade more frequently).

So you end up with the average capital gain achieved by holding an average of 20% in each of domestic, foreign, commodities, REIT and bonds, but additionally benefit from rebalance gains of (in this example) nearly 4% p.a.

What somewhat complicates estimates is that Mebane's timing has you in for around 70% on average (out for 30%), as such that 4% rebalance benefit might be considered as potentially dropping to 0.7 x 4% = 2.8% rebalance benefit. That is however a net benefit after trading costs (i.e. you're in cash for the duration of the Mebane 10m sma based OUT timing signal so don't capture rebalance benefits during that OUT time).

As per Mebane's, periodically you have to realign each component back to 20% stock value relative to the whole and as such calculate new Ladder top's and bottom's etc. But with a spreadsheet and calculator its pretty simple.

A principle benefit that Ladder provides IMO is that you know (or rather can calculate) all the parameters and boundaries beforehand, when you'd be all-in or all-out against each of the components, the likely average rebalance profits etc.

Best. Clive.