Countries from the majority of the developed world face one challenge: Their population is steadily aging; the average age of individuals has been rising over recent periods. The United States is not different in this sense. Whenever there’s a never-inevitable reaching of higher ages, people reconsider their choices and often cut on riskier ones. So, is there a potential link between demographic changes associated with aging and aggregate financial market outcomes?

If you’re a regular reader of our blogs (and we hope you are!), you would not miss that we like to touch macro-economic subjects. One of that never-fading topics is the role of gold as a crisis hedge. The probably most known commodity is a popular choice for a portion of the total portfolio, from small investors to central banks, for various reasons (be it diversification or hedging). So let’s not further delay it, and today we ask: Is gold really a safe haven?

In the last third installment, we will finish exploring the world of market timing strategies (see parts 1 & 2). We will focus on yield curve predictors and incorporate all three ideas (price-based, macro-economic, and yield curve predictors) into one final trading strategy that yields an annual return above that of the stock market while doubling its Sharpe ratio and reducing maximal drawdown by two thirds.

In this second installment in a series of three articles, we will continue with our goal to construct a market timing strategy that would sidestep the equity market during bear markets. A few days ago, we started with price-based market timing strategies. Today, we will focus on macroeconomic indicators and predictors derived from the movements in the commodity markets.

In this series of three articles, our goal is to construct a market timing strategy that would reliably sidestep the equity market during bear markets, thereby reducing market volatility and boosting risk-adjusted returns. We will build trading signals based on price-based indicators, macroeconomic indicators, and a leading indicator, a yield curve, that would try to predict recessions and bear markets in advance. All three articles would be published in a span of the next few days. We start with the first part – a short intro into the market timing strategies using price-based rules.

Cryptocurrencies are a high-risk and very speculative asset class that, from being used only by tech geeks worldwide, spread from small retail craziness of early adopters to institutional adoption and mainstream. Some claim it to be a world-changing concept with the utilization of blockchain (databases) and smart contracts that open a wide range of opportunities, from decentralizing finance to self-governing algorithms; some others point to unnecessary scams, money laundering, and bubbles. We have been covering the concepts and topics relating to crypto extensively. This article will continue our investigation of this interesting field. We would like to test how the price action looks around some of the events unique to the cryptocurrency world – namely the Bitcoin reward halvings and hard and soft forks in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.