Stopped the Systematic Strategies

Last week I stopped following these strategies, both the momentum and The Acquirer's multiple.

Returns have been quite bad since starting in February:

• 2% for the momentum strategy.  Its been a choppy market.
• -28% for The Acquirers Multiple.  Value investing has done badly compared to momentum, since 2009 (1) (2).  I'm sure it will come back, I just don't know when.

On a daily basis, both strategies are high beta, and follow/magnify the movement of the Russel 3000 index.  If the index is up 1%, they're usually up 2-3%.  Same for down.  Holding 'value' - at least this kind of 'deep value' - meaning companies that are nearly dead - does not protect you.  On down days, they do worse than the market.

The reasons for stopping:

• Its hard to stick with when it goes wrong for long periods.  When you manually analyse and select own value stocks one-by-one, if a stock goes down, you can try to see why.  Has something changed with the fundamentals, or the macro environment?  Or have perceptions changed?  Has the whole market dropped?  Did you make a mistake?  You can (at least) try to look at the stock with a level head and see if you should cut losses or hold.  With a portfolio of non-discretionary stocks, theres nothing to do except to have blind faith,
• Manually analysing stocks takes more time and effort, but I can choose when to do it.  In most cases my long term investments won't be affected by missing a few weeks of work.  The exceptions are if results are unexpectedly bad, or for sudden crises (eg: HK protests) - though even these take weeks or months to play out.
• It was a pain in the ass to stay up trading 9:30-10:30 Monday nights.  I found Interactive Brokers pretty hard to use, sometimes I sold the wrong amount and accidentally ended up short.  It was only one hour a week, but it was a chore, and I didn't like doing it at nights.

I think the main advantage of the non-discretionary strategies is that it keeps you in the market, so you avoid FOMO.  However they get whipsawed in a trendless market, and will not protect you agains a 1987 style crash.

In the end, I decided hold cash, while building up a dividend portfolio.  I think this suite my personality better, and I can measure progress by dividends collected, instead basing it on stock price fluctuations.

Right now I'm 2/3rds in cash.

Like a diet, the best investment strategy is one you can stick with.