"Fire and Fury" is hard

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 the 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.


War is hard
President Donald Trump has achieved few major legislative victories in his six month presidency, despite the Republican majority in both the Senate and House. One disappointment was the failure of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare because of disagreements between different wings of the GOP. Trump has learned that "healthcare is hard". Similarly, "tax reform is hard".

By design, American government was built on a system of checks and balances. While Trump's legislative initiatives may be held up by Congressional dissension, the President has far fewer constraints in the conduct of trade policy, foreign policy, and military affairs. In particular, he can do more or less what he wants without Congressional oversight when it comes to his role as Commander-in-Chief of the American military.

As the markets are gone risk-off in light of Trump's "fire and fury" comment about North Korea, I am going to depart from the usual economic and market analysis this week and focus on the question of the constraints on President Trump in a conflict with North Korea. To be sure, the markets are showing a high degree of fear that war could break out on the Korean peninsula. Past scares has seen little reaction from the Korean Won (KRW) or Korean equities. This time, South Korean stocks are tanking, both on an absolute basis and relative to global stocks.

Investors should relax. As Donald Trump is about to find out, "War is hard too".

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