The "trend following" Permanent Portfolio signals

[MachineGhost]

Why are you using the middle of the month?

[ochotona]

I'm going to get back onto the end-of-month schedule.

ALL FOUR PP ASSETS ARE "ON" AS OF 4/1/2016

[var]

are u using real money to do this?

[ochotona]

are u using real money to do this?

OH YES.... indeed... 60% of my entire portfolio is trend-following. This is a serious commitment.

[Cortopassi]

Ocho, the 10 month Ivy signals got back in stocks on April 1.  From the chart, looks like late 2015-2016 so far has been possibly the most whipsawed period of the past 20 years?  It's worked well in the past, but more than anything I am personalyl just using this as confirmation bias that I am doing the right thing by not doing this and just using PP bands.

[MachineGhost]

Ocho, the 10 month Ivy signals got back in stocks on April 1.  From the chart, looks like late 2015-2016 so far has been possibly the most whipsawed period of the past 20 years?  It's worked well in the past, but more than anything I am personalyl just using this as confirmation bias that I am doing the right thing by not doing this and just using PP bands.

No, 1994 had more whipsaws.  4 in a row if I recall correctly.

What trend following does is basically shift risk; in return for giving up half of the drawdown, you take on whipsaw and tracking risk.  No free lunch it seems.  The trick is that the when-invested gains overcome the cumulative whipsawed losses as well as the missed opportunity losses from not being fully invested at a bottom.  It does do that which is the only reason why it works.

I like downside risk management so long as I don't personally have to be responsible for it.  It's emotionally tough to be flittering in and out of the markets with huge chunks of your capital.  You have both fear of missing out as well as fear of being whipsawed.

Besides, the PP hedging only works by relying on the assets to be fully invested at all times.  Using trend following on the assets changes the correlated risk parity such that the optimal weights may be entirely different than a fully invested PP.