THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN GAINS AND LOSSES. The Fed is on a roll adding BAC ML Bond Indicies and now complete history for the four primary Dow Jones Indexes, so I wanted to extend my first post Long XLU Shor...

Since we have the Gifts from BAC ML and the Federal Reserve, I thought I should look at another interesting element of bonds.  Bond spreads act as a very strong symbol of financial stability and confidence.  The St. Louis Fed Stress Index is ...

Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Fed continue to surprise me with even more gifts.  This time they added Emerging Market Bond Indexes with history back to 1998 (cannot see Asia Pacific Crisis of 1997-1998 but...

After all my complaining about proprietary data, the St. Louis Federal Reserve announced today the availability of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Bond Indicies on their FRED site.  The data is limited in scope and duration, but accessibility especi...

When I see extremes, I feel compelled to explore. The US 10y Treasury yield is at an extreme versus the annualized 3 month CPI rate of change. From TimelyPortfolio Of course, I have to try to build a system around the idea.  While this 3 mont...

I first wanted to thank http://www.fosstrading.com for the very kind and unexpected mention over the weekend.  You will notice almost all of my code contains some credit to Foss Trading for the examples and great packages.  I hate that I coul...

After the slightly unconventional use of LSPM presented in Slightly Different Use of Ralph Vince’s Leverage Space Trading Model, I thought I should follow up with something that more closely resembles my interpretation of Ralph Vince’s book. LSPM s...

Building on posts Great FAJ Article on Statistical Measure of Financial Turbulence and Great FAJ Article on Statistical Measure of Financial Turbulence Part 2, I will now build a system incorporating a new correlation-based measure of turbulence and a ...

I did not intend for this to be a multi-part series, but after some clear thinking at the beach over the weekend, I decided that it needed some more analysis.  For those of you that read the article or know Mahalanobis distance, the measure I pre...

After a little additional thought, I discovered that my Death Spiral Warning Graph post can be improved through the isolation of the expected inflation component of US 10y yields provided by the US 10y yield – US 10y TIP yield.  Unfortunately, i...

Thanks so much for the comment on my last post Historical Bond Price and Total Returns from 10y Yield Series “I know this might sound antithetical to a bond guy, but won't the monthly series get you close enough? “ which proved me wrong and allow...

Without access to Barclays or Merrill Bond Indicies to the 1970s or Ned Davis to 1950, studying historical bond returns is very difficult.  Here is a way to derive price and total returns on the 10 year US Treasury back to 1962.  I would like...

And as usual, I always want a longer data set, so after a little playing with R-Excel, we can extend our historical sources of bond returns to 1919.  If nothing else, maybe you can find other uses for the Shiller Dataset in R. From TimelyPort...

As promised in Monitoring Sources of Bond Return, we can show more history if we use CPI instead of expected inflation (from the TIP inflation breakeven yield).  Here are the results with history back to 1953. From TimelyPortfolio However, mo...

Here is a way to monitor bond return sources in R.  In the next iteration, I will use CPI to add history to the series. From TimelyPortfolio So right now, you can expect about a 5% return from bonds.  How much of that is real return is u...

Before starting Part 2, please see Bonds as a Casino Game Part 1.   For the Monte Carlo random simulation purists, please ignore some unimportant technicalities in my simulation. To spoil the fun, here is the conclusion: Any way you look at ...