I Will Do What the Model Says to Do

Maybe today will finally knock my tendency to not follow the model out of me, but I kind of doubt it. I am getting better though. Today, I closed my short position early. That's not such a bad move. But then near the close I went long, because I thought the model was saying to go long tomorrow. But I had forgotten the correct way to read that rule and read it wrongly – I used today's value of the indicator instead of the forecast of it for tomorrow. The model in fact says to stay short into Thursday. The market continued to plummet and took away most of my gains for the day. Still, I am up for the month, for now.

I must fast-track model automation. First step is to convert the decision rules, which I now execute manually and record in an Excel spreadsheet into computer code (in my econometrics package) that can make decisions without errors. Then I need to get better at just doing the decisions at the right time while learning Python etc in order to build an automated system or getting someone else on board to do that. In the meantime, I will stick to trading a single contract to minimize risk.

New Investment: Pershing Square Holdings

I made a small (1% of net assets) investment in Pershing Square Holdings (PSH.L). This is a closed end fund trading on the London Stock Exchange that is managed by Pershing Square Capital Management, the fund founded and managed by William Ackman. Pershing Square funds did very well from 2004 to 2014, which is when they launched the closed end fund. They did very poorly in the next three years:

PSH lost 20.5%, 13.5%, and 4% in each of 2015, 2016, 2017. However, NAV has gained 15% or so year to date. The stock trades at a 27% discount to NAV. Given the past good performance, the return of good performance this year, and the substantial discount which the company is trying to reduce, I thought this was worth trying. Ackman and the firm are in the news for a $900 million investment in Starbucks, discussed here.

If you are wondering why a US hedge fund is listed in London, it's because it's not legal to offer hedge funds to retail investors in the US.

Generation Global Share Fund Closed to New Investors

It turns out that the Generation Global Share Fund is closed to new investors and so I couldn't do the fund switch I tried to do yesterday. CFS's systems allowed me and the guy I phoned to select this option but then rejected the complete portfolio. So I recomputed the numbers and did the switch online now. New allocation is:

CFS Geared Share Fund: 7%
CFS Geared Growth Plus: 40%
CFS Conservative: 11%
Platinum International: 23%
CFS Developing Companies: 19%

Gearing in the Geared Growth Fund is lower than in the Geared Share Fund. Still it is quite aggressive and I will likely delever further at some stage.

Moominmama Allocation

Following up from yesterday's post on delevering in my retail superannuation (retirement) account, here is the desired allocation compared to actual allocation in Moominmama's (formerly Snork Maiden - I mention this because I used to refer to my mother as Moominmama on the blog) Colonial First State managed funds account (in American: taxable mutual fund account). Desired allocation:

CFS Geared Share Fund: 19%
CFS Global Geared Share Fund: 9%
Platinum International: 27%
Generation Global Share: 13%
BT Property Investment: 13%
CFS Developing Companies: 19%

Actual:

CFS Geared Share Fund: 28.3%
CFS Global Geared Share Fund: 16.0%
Platinum International: 11.0%
Generation Global Share: 16.4%
BT Property Investment: 12.6%
CFS Developing Companies: 15.7%

The funds are in: geared (leveraged) Australian shares, geared  global shares, global equity hedge fund, global shares, REITS, small cap Australian shares.

We are moving towards the desired allocation slowly by only adding each month to the underweight funds and by not reinvesting distributions. If things looked worse, maybe I would then actually switch funds, but then there will be a capital gains tax bill. Unlike the US, even at low income levels you have to pay capital gains tax (unless you earned less than AUD 18k a year and paid no income tax), though the long-term rate is half the normal income tax rate (for the moment).

This is how our asset allocation has evolved since the financial crisis:

 This doesn't include our house. The main trend is a reduction in allocation to Australian large cap srtocks since the recovery bounce from the crisis and an increase in other asset classes.