Subject: Re: Allocate Smartly and Timing
Do paid members on Allocate Smartly get access to out-of-sample performance? I tried to poke around and all it shows me is backtested performance.

There are occasional references to out-of-sample performance in the commentary posts that discuss the individual strategies when they are first added to the site; but it is not a regular or recurring feature, and in practice not easy to judge. These kinds of strategies have become much more popular since the dot-com crash, the advent of ETFs as trading vehicles, and the growth of tax deferred retail investing in the context of IRAs and 401Ks. The financial crisis of 2008 also showed that static diversification does not provide as much protection as people apparently expected. Hence "tactical," vs static or "strategic," allocation.

The basic principles and the underlying idea have presumably been around forever, but my sense is that a kind of starting gun for retail investors was fire by Mebane Faber in a paper published in 2006

https://www.trendfollowing.com...

So the "out of sample" period is liable to be fairly short for many of the strategies discussed.

Allocate Smartly's value added includes rigorous confirmative back-testing of published strategies; but pre- and post-discovery details are not necessarily discussed. The aim is primarily to confirm or undermine claims by the original author of the strategy being studied. One could of course seek out the original strategy, whose publication date would allow one to identify post-discovery results.

The site's backtesting database (which is not publicly visible) seems to go back to 1970. This means that they are sometimes able to backtest strategies further back in time than the original author; but again, details are not generally provided. Depending on the indexes or asset classes involved, backtests may be shorter than that. Many allocation strategies include asset classes for which relevant data is not available further back.

Baltassar