Analysis of Valuation-Informed Indexing?
My reaction to this is that your observation @D.W. is spot on correct: It sounds like long-term market timing: trying to do a better job than   the rest of the market at predicting, based upon a simple formula,   whether the market is over-priced or under-priced. I read the post by the founder of Valuation Informed Indexing, Rob Bennet. Glance at  the comments section. Rob clearly states that he doesn't even use his own strategy, and has not owned, nor traded, any stocks since 1996! As another commenter summarizes it, addressing Rob: This is 2011. You’ve been 100% out of stocks — including indexes —   since 1996? That’s 15 years of taking whatever the bond market, CDs or   TIPS will yield (often and currently less than 2%)... I’m curious how   you defend not following your own program even as you recommend it for   others? Rob basically says that stocks haven't shown the right signals for buying since 1996, so he's stuck with bonds, CD's and fixed-income instead. This is a VERY long-term horizon point of view (a bit of sarcasm edges in from me). Answering your more general question, what do I think of this particular Price/ Earnings based ratio as a way to signal asset allocation change i.e. Valuation Informed Investing? I don't like it much. This is Rob Bennett, the fellow who developed the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy and the fellow who is discussed in the comment above. The facts stated in that comment are accurate -- I went to a zero stock allocation in the Summer of 1996 because of my belief in Robert Shiller's research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. The conclusion stated, that I have said that I do not myself follow the strategy, is of course silly. If I believe in it, why wouldn't I follow it? It's true that this is a long-term strategy. That's by design. I see that as a benefit, not a bad thing. It's certainly true that VII presumes that the Efficient Market Theory is invalid. If I thought that the market were efficient, I would endorse Buy-and-Hold. All of the conventional investing advice of recent decades follows logically from a belief in the Efficient Market Theory. The only problem I have with that advice is that Shiller's research discredits the Efficient Market Theory. There is no one stock allocation that everyone following a VII strategy should adopt any more than there is any one stock allocation that everyone following a Buy-and-Hold strategy should adopt. My personal circumstances have called for a zero stock allocation. But I generally recommend that the typical middle-class investor go with a 20 percent stock allocation even at times when stock prices are insanely high. You have to make adjustments for your personal financial circumstances. It is certainly fair to say that it is strange that stock prices have remained insanely high for so long. What people are missing is that we have never before had claims that Buy-and-Hold strategies are supported by academic research. Those claims caused the biggest bull market in history and it will take some time for the widespread belief in such claims to diminish. We are in the process of seeing that happen today.  The good news is that, once there is a consensus that Buy-and-Hold can never work, we will likely have the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history. The power of academic research has been used to support Buy-and-Hold for decades now because of the widespread belief that the market is efficient. Turn that around and investors will possess a stronger belief in the need to practice long-term market timing than they have ever possessed before. In that sort of environment, both bull markets and bear markets become logical impossibilities. Emotional extremes in one direction beget emotional extremes in the other direction. The stock market has been more emotional in the past 16 years than it has ever been in any earlier time (this is evidenced by the wild P/E10 numbers that have applied for that entire time-period). Now that we are seeing the losses that follow from investing in highly emotional ways, we may see rational strategies becoming exceptionally popular for an exceptionally long period of time. I certainly hope so! The comment above that this will not work for individual stocks is correct. This works only for those investing in indexes. The academic research shows that there has never yet in 140 years of data been a time when Valuation-Informed Indexing has not provided far higher long-term returns at greatly diminished risk. But VII is not a strategy designed for stock pickers. There is no reason to believe that it would work for stock pickers. Thanks much for giving this new investing strategy some thought and consideration and for inviting comments that help investors to understand both points of view about it. Rob
"P/E alone would not work very well. See for example http://www.hussmanfunds.com/html/peak2pk.htm and http://www.hussmanfunds.com/rsi/profitmargins.htm (in short, P/E is affected too much by cyclical changes in profit margins, or you might say: booms inflate the E beyond sustainable levels, thus making the P/E look more favorable than it is). Here's a random blog post that points to Schiller's normalized earnings measure: http://seekingalpha.com/article/247257-s-p-500-is-expensive-using-normalized-earnings I think even Price to Sales is supposed to work better than P/E for predicting 10-year returns on a broad index, because it effectively normalizes the margins. (Normalized valuation explains the variance in 10-year returns better than the variance in 1-year returns, I think I've read; you can't rely on things ""reverting to mean"" in only 1 year.) Another issue with P/E is that E is more subject to weird accounting effects than for example revenues. For example whether stock compensation is expensed or one-time write-offs are included or whatever can mean you end up with an economically strange earnings number. btw, a simple way to do what you describe here would be to put a chunk of money into funds that vary equity exposure. For example John Hussman's fund has an elaborate model that he uses to decide when to hedge. Say you invest 40% bonds, 40% stocks, and 20% in Hussman Strategic Growth. When Hussman fully hedges his fund, you would effectively have 40% in stocks; and when he fully unhedges it, you would have 60% in stocks. This isn't quite the whole story; he also tries to pick up some gains through stock picking, so when fully hedged the fund isn't quite equivalent to cash, more like a market-neutral fund. (For Hussman Funds in particular, he's considered stocks to be overvalued for most of the last 15 years, and the fund is almost always fully hedged, so you'd want to be comfortable with that.) There are other funds out there doing similar stuff. There are certainly funds that vary equity exposure though most not as dramatically as the Hussman fund. Some possibilities might be PIMCO All-Asset All-Authority, PIMCO Multi-Asset, perhaps. Or just some value-oriented funds with willingness to deviate from benchmarks. Definitely read the prospectus on all these and research other options, I just thought it would be helpful to mention a couple of specific examples. If you wanted to stick to managing ETFs yourself, Morningstar's premium service has an interesting feature where they take the by-hand bottom-up analysis of all the stocks in an ETF, and use that to calculate an over- or under-valuation ratio for the ETF. I don't know if the Morningstar bottom-up stuff necessarily works; I'm sure they make the ""pro"" case on their site. On the ""con"" side, in the financial crisis bubble bursting, they cut their valuation on many companies and they had a high valuation on a lot of the financials that blew up. While I haven't run any stats and don't have the data, in several specific cases it looked like their bottom-up analysis ended up assuming too-high profit margins would continue. Broad-brush normalized valuation measures avoided that mistake by ignoring the details of all the individual companies and assuming the whole index had to revert to mean. If you're rich, I think you can hire GMO to do a varied-equity-exposure strategy for you (http://www.gmo.com/America/).  You could also look at the ""fundamental indexing"" ETFs that weight by dividends or P/E or other measures of value, rather than by market cap. The bottom line is, there are lots of ways to do tactical asset allocation. It seems complex enough that I'm not sure it's something you'd want to manage yourself. There are also a lot of managers doing this that I personally am not comfortable with because they don't seem to have a discipline or method that they explain well enough, or they don't seem to do enough backtesting and math, or they rely on macroeconomic forecasts that probably aren't reliable, or whatever. All of these tactical allocation strategies are flavors of active management. I'm most comfortable with active management when it has a fairly objective, testable, and logical discipline to it, such as Graham&Buffett style value investing, Hussman's statistical methods, or whatever it is.  Many people will argue that all active management is bad and there's no way to distinguish among any of it. I am not in that camp, but I do think a lot of active managers are bad, and that it's pretty hard to distinguish among them, and I think active management is more likely to help with risk control than it is to help with beating the market. Still you should know (and probably already do know, but I'll note for other readers) that there's a strong argument smart people make that you're best off avoiding this whole line of tactical-allocation thinking and just sticking to the pure cap-based index funds." Those are the expected yields; they are not guaranteed. This was actually the bread and butter of Graham Newman, mispriced bonds.  Graham's writings in the Buffett recommended edition of Securities Analysis are invaluable to bond valuation. The highest yielder now is a private subsidiary of Société Générale.  A lack of financial statements availability and the fact that this is the US derivatives markets subsidiary are probably the cause of the higher rates. The cost is about a million USD to buy them. The rest will be similar cases, but Graham's approach could find a diamond; however, bonds are big ticket items, so one should expect to pay many hundreds of thousands of USD per trade. "Although is not online, I use a standalone version from http://jstock.sourceforge.net It got drag-n-drop boxes, to let me design my own indicators. However, it only contain technical analysis information, not fundamental analysis information. It does come with tutorial http://jstock.sourceforge.net/help_stock_indicator_editor.html#indicator-example, on how to to build an indicator, to screen ""Stock which Its Price Hits Their 14 Days Maximum""" "If there's indeed no reason to trust GS, i.e. those are just guides   then the question is: Why do investors seem to care? Because there's a reason to trust. You're just reading the bottom line - the target price range. More involved investors read the whole report, including the description of the current situation, the premises for the analysis, the expectations on the firm's performance and what these expectations are based on, the analysis of how the various scenarios might affect the valuation, and the evaluation of chances of these scenarios to occur. You don't have to trust everything and expect it to be 100% correct, analysts are not prophets. But you do have an option of reading their reports and critically analyzing their conclusions. What you suspect GS of doing (""I tend to believe those guys just want themselves a cheap buy price a few days before Q2 earnings release"") is a criminal offence." The Art of Short Selling by Kathryn Stanley providers for many case studies about what kind of opportunities to look for from a fundamental analysis perspective. Typically things you can look for are financing terms that are not very favorable (expensive interest payments) as well as other constrictions on cash flow, arbitrary decisions by management (poor management), and dilution that doesn't make sense (usually another product of poor management). From a quantitative analysis perspective, you can gain insight by looking at the credit default swap rate history, if the company is listed in that market. The things that affect a CDS spread are different than what immediately affects share prices. Some market participants trade DOOMs over Credit Default Swaps, when they are betting on a company's insolvency. But looking at large trades in the options market isn't indicative of anything on its own, but you can use that information to help confirm your opinion. You can certainly jump on a trend using bad headlines, but typically by the time it is headline news, the majority of the downward move in the share price has already happened, or the stock opened lower because the news came outside of market hours. You have to factor in the short interest of the company, if the short interest is high then it will be very easy to squeeze the shorts resulting in a rally of share prices, the opposite of what you want. A short squeeze doesn't change the fundamental or quantitative reasons you wanted to short. The technical analysis should only be used to help you decide your entry and exit price ranges amongst an otherwise random walk. The technical rules you created sound like something a very basic program or stock screener might be able to follow, but it doesn't tell you anything, you will have to do research in the company's public filings yourself. "Thanks for the response.   I am using WRDS database and we are currently filtering through various variables like operating income, free cash flow etc.  Main issue right now is that the database seems to only go up to 2015...is there a similar database that has 2016 info?  filtering out the ""recent equity issuance or M&amp;A activity exceeding 10% of total assets"" is another story, namely, how can I identify M&amp;A activity? I suppose we can filter it with algorithm stating if company's equity suddenly jumps 10% or more, it get's flagged" Moreover to make items easier, company owners can uncover several expert neighborhood company listing support providers inside the industry nowadays. The professionals support increases the effects of [local business listing](http://come2ourdeals.com.au) with the aid of Seo Google Maps and numerous others. Why is that this crucial? Given below would be the 5 rewards. No. The long-term valuation of currencies has to do with Purchasing Power Parity.  The long-term valuation of stocks has to do with revenues, expenses, market sizes, growth rates, and interest rates. In the short term, currency and stock prices change for many reasons, including interest rate changes, demand for goods and services, asset price changes, political fears, and momentum investing.  In any given time window, a currency or stock might be: The Relative Strength Index tries to say whether a currency or stock has recently been rising or falling; it does not inherently say anything about whether the current value is high or low.