A focus on growth

Preface: Explaining our market timing models
We maintain several market timing models, each with differing time horizons. The "Ultimate Market Timing Model" is a long-term market timing model based on the research outlined in our post, Building the ultimate market timing model. This model tends to generate only a handful of signals each decade.

The Trend Model is an asset allocation model which applies trend following principles based on the inputs of global stock and commodity price. This model has a shorter time horizon and tends to turn over about 4-6 times a year. In essence, it seeks to answer the question, "Is the trend in the global economy expansion (bullish) or contraction (bearish)?"

My inner trader uses the trading component of the Trend Model to look for changes in direction of the main Trend Model signal. A bullish Trend Model signal that gets less bullish is a trading "sell" signal. Conversely, a bearish Trend Model signal that gets less bearish is a trading "buy" signal. The history of actual out-of-sample (not backtested) signals of the trading model are shown by the arrows in the chart below. Past trading of the trading model has shown turnover rates of about 200% per month.

The latest signals of each model are as follows:

• Ultimate market timing model: Buy equities*
• Trend Model signal: Risk-on*
• Trading model: Bearish*

* The performance chart and model readings have been delayed by a week out of respect to our paying subscribers.

Update schedule: I generally update model readings on my site on weekends and tweet mid-week observations at @humblestudent. Subscribers will also receive email notices of any changes in my trading portfolio.


It's not all about Trump
In the past few weeks, market analysis in these pages have been all Trump, all the time. As America`s 45th president assumed his first full week in office, his administration made a number of rookie mistakes that gave the impression of a government in disarray.

Politico reported that many of presidential executive orders were drafted by Trump aides Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon without consultation with the relevant departments or Congress. These actions made the implementation of some aspects of the executive orders difficult, impractical, or possibly illegal. CNBC reported that the Trump aides were leaking stories as a sign of infighting between different factions. Not only that, the Washington Post reported that most of the senior bureaucrats at the State Department, most of whom had served both Democrat and Republican administrations, had resigned en masse, which deprived the department of years of experience in the nuts-and-bolts of foreign policy.

So how did the stock market react to these events? The Dow proceeded to rally above 20,000 to make an all-time high, as did the SPX. This kind of market reaction in the face of negative political news is bullish. Moreover, it showed that investors and traders had turned their focus to the most important metric of equity performance, namely the growth outlook.

Indeed, analysis from Deutsche Bank showed that macro growth surprises have been the biggest driver of equity prices for the last 15 months (via Bloomberg).

The full post can be found at our new site here.