Wednesday, September 1, 2010

"Secret Sauce" Makes a New High

The secret sauce was first revealed back in July 2008 when I had about 50 readers (and had no idea how to make charts "pretty").

What is the secret sauce? An alternative to the "sell in May, go away"; sell the S&P 500 in May and then invest in the Long Government / Credit bond index (rather than sit in cash). The "strategy" (I wouldn't necessarily call it that) takes advantage of the following data (mining) that shows the Long G/C has outperformed the equity market for the May through October time frame over this 36 year period.

Average Returns by Month



The cumulative result (as of month-end August) since August 1974 (Long G/C data only goes back to 1974).



Update:

Reader Norman comments:

A useable presentation would be to divide the 'secret sauce' by the S&P 500. The way you have it now its impossible to see if the ss has been performing well, lately.
Here you go...



And in log scale...



Source: Barclays Capital / S&P

7 comments:

  1. There's nothing secret about this. Your strategy involves buying bonds that experienced a massive bull market during most of that period, and your strategy holds them for almost half of every year. Of course it will be superior to "going away," or 0%.

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  2. you're just jealous you didn't data-mine it...

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  3. Bottle that shayeet! Jealous much anon, I know I am!

    Jake, you have my email if you want to share any more tips........

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  4. A useable presentation would be to divide the 'secret sauce' by the S&P 500. The way you have it now its impossible to see if the ss has been performing well, lately.

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  5. log scale on cumulative result, please!

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  6. I think the labels on the log scale chart are wrong. It looks like SP500 performs better than secret sauce.

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  7. fixed with slightly off colors...

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