To The Moon

Summary

This is a repost of an article provided to our investment community at Seeking Alpha.

The main purpose is to update our holdings in case you share an interest in the stocks and ETFs that we hold.

The second purpose is to alert you about a red flag in the narrowing of the yield spread between BAA bond and treasury bond rates.

Combined with the inverted yield curve, it is a signal that we are watching closely.

Front matters

There are not many changes to our SWP (survival-withdrawal) portfolio this month.

Overall, we see bonds have become more attractive relative to equity. And hence, we decreased our Equity-Bond ratio from 70.5% to 69.0% this month. As a result, we sold some VTI and VEU and added some treasury bonds. For tactical holdings, we increased our TSN positions a bit following our recent trade alerts. All told, our SWP essentially tied the overall market’s performance (a small ~0.4% lag to be precise) after adjusting for dividends as shown in the chart below. Since the changes are relatively minor, we put them in the last section more like an appendix this time.

And the main thing worth mentioning this month is a red flag on our radar this month. As we will illustrate more next.

Stay calm and do not hesitate to reach out as usual.

SWP cumulative return since Feb 1, 2022

Yield Spread between BAA bonds and Treasury Rates

A small red flag showed up on our dashboard this month as seen below. More specifically, the Yield Spread between BAA bonds and Treasury Rates (SBAA) has narrowed to 1.78% only – a bit narrower than what we deem as “normal”. Historically, SBAA has been in the range of ~1.9% to 3.2% most of the time (see the second chart below). The current level of SBAA only occurred 2 times since 2007 as seen. To us, an SBAA narrower than 1.9% signals the beginning of extreme overvaluation of stocks relative to bonds.

A related parameter, gamma, is our main risk gauge. It considers several fundamental macroeconomic forces and SBAA is one of them. Other key parameters included in gamma are the yield spread between long-term and short-term treasury bonds (which remain inverted) and the CAPE ratio of the S&P 500 (which is above the historical average by a good amount currently).

Gamma is constructed in our model so that a value of 1 means risk-neutral, a value less than 1 means equity is risky, and a value larger than 1 means bonds are risky. As mentioned earlier, we have a “business-as-usual” allocation model – where we only make gradual changes (like what we have been doing so far). And we have a “bottom-fishing” allocation model – either for equity or bonds. And Gamma is our main parameter to decide if it is time to activate the latter model.

This month, the narrowing of SBAA finally pushed gamma to be below 1. It is at 0.96, not that far below 1. Although given the combination of all three macroeconomic signals mentioned above, it has gotten our attention and it is something that we keep watching closely. Will provide updates as we go.

Specific changes

We performed our account maintenance in the later PM yesterday, Feb 14. And all the price info were taken near market close on Feb 14.

As usual, chart 1 below provides a snapshot of the portfolio before the maintenance, chart 2 a snapshot of the portfolio adjustment that we made, and chart 3 the portfolio for the incoming month.

Chart 1 –the SWP portfolio before the maintenance

Chart 2 - the portfolio adjustment that we made

Chart 3 - the portfolio for the incoming month

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