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What If America's Economic Growth Is Fake?

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Saturday, Sep 09, 2023 - 13:31
Elaine Benes "Fake, fake, fake, fake" Seinfeld meme.

What If It's All Fake Growth? 

One of the mysteries of the current economic cycle is that we've had lots of recession indicators without the actual recession. One of my favorite economists to follow on Twitter, Philip Pilkington, may have figured out the mystery: our economic growth is fake. On Thursday, he laid out his reasoning in this thread:

 

Can They Keep This Up Until After The Election?

That's the question Pilkington addressed in his follow up thread on Friday. Cutting to the punchline of it: 

Unsurprisingly, Pilkington concludes on a note of uncertainty (he is an economist after all). 

Investing Amid This Uncertainty

If Pilkington is right, one would expect our economic chickens to come home roost at some point, and for that to be reflected in a bear market. The problem with betting on that outcome now though is that you would lose money waiting for that bear market to happen. 

Another approach to this sort of uncertainty is to bet on a handful of top names continuing to do well, and hedging in case they don't (or the market as a whole tanks). We call that the Hedged Portfolio Method. Here's a real-world example from earlier this year. 

This was the hedged portfolio our system presented to an investor on March 2nd who had $3 million to invest but was unwilling to risk a decline of more than 30% over the next six months. 

Screen captures via the Portfolio Armor web app on 3/2/2023. 

A few notes on the portfolio above: 

  • This was a $3 million portfolio, but our system will present this for dollar amounts as small as $30,000. 
  • The securities in this portfolio were on Portfolio Armor's top names ranking of the ones with the highest estimated returns over the next six months, net of hedging costs. 
  • One of these names, Nvidia (NVDA), was also on our "cash substitutes" list: these are securities that generate large net credits when tightly hedged. After rounding down equal dollar amounts of each of the seven different securities in this portfolio, our system used a tightly collared NVDA position to absorb most of that leftover cash. 
  • The expected return here was 11% over the next six months. 

How That Hedged Portfolio Actually Did

Net of hedging and trading costs, this portfolio returned 18.67% over the next six months, versus 14.28% for the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY) over the same period. 

Perhaps something to consider for those of you who are risk averse here. If you don't want to risk a 30% decline, you can use this approach with decline thresholds as low as 2%. 

 

If You Want To Stay In Touch

You follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now). If you'd like to have your system create a custom hedged portfolio for you, you can join the Portfolio Armor web app. If you do, contact me via the site, and I'll throw in a free six-month premium subscription to our trading Substack. 

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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