A NEW service from engineering-returns to provide YOU with a better investment experience. PortfolioTrader is targeted at the active investor who wants to take care of it’s capital growth.
What you need to know about Portfolio Trader?
Portfolio Trader (PT) is actively trading the US equity market and seeking returns from capitalizing on upward and downward price trends. Furthermore it seeks returns from short-term market inefficiencies. It’s designed to archive positive returns through all market cycles, though it can under perform the market in certain extreme conditions.
Systematic: Trade decisions are based on quantitative methods. These methods are back-tested on 10+ years of historical market data. In order to provide a diversified stream of returns multiple trading methods and systems are applied, e.g. trend following or mean reversion. The set of diversified trading systems is being improved constantly and new systems might be added going forward.
Simple: Trades can be placed over the weekend by submitting market-on-open orders for the next day. All trading signals and statistics are posted at a dedicated web-page. You can stay up-to-date by subscribing to my TWITTER account or RSS Feed.
Innovative: Once subscribed to Portfolio Trader innovation won’t end. We continue innovate in the area of systematic trading. The trading systems that make up Portfolio Trader will updated accordingly.
Diversified: How is PortfolioTrader different from other services out there? The trading systems being part of PortfolioTrader are using a diversified set of trading styles for a number of different asset classes. The idea behind that: not everything will work all the time. Combining various trading systems will reduce volatility in your returns and provide you with a better investment experience.
What makes up Portfolio Trader?
A number of different trading systems combined with a cross system money management:
Stocks (long): Trading Nasdaq100 stocks in a momentum and mean-reversion driven approach. The system is adapting to given market conditions and thereby deciding how to trade the market: e.g. mean-reversion, momentum or mix of both. Stocks are ranked on multiple dimensions. The strongest five stocks will be held for a week, then re-ranking occurs. In case of a strongly negative stock market environment all positions will be closed and the system remains in cash. A position is held for about ten days in average. The system is most of the time invested.
Stocks (short): Trading S&P 100 stocks showing downward momentum. The system trades in strongly overbought markets and therefore also acts as a hedge for the other systems. Furthermore it’s invested when the overall market is weak. A position is held for about five to ten days.
ETF: The system will trade the strongest ETFs out of a basket of major asset class ETFs (long only). A position is held for about twenty days.
Money management: In order to avoid cluster risk the correlation among the different portfolio holdings will impact the size of a specific position. Our advanced money management approach will take care of that.
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What else is important?
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No Investment Advice
Frank Hassler has developed Portfolio Trader to manage his own portfolio; hence he is also mirroring the trades in his personal account. This should not be considered as investment advice.
Model Portfolio
The model portfolio will start with 100.000 USD. The portfolio won’t be leveraged for it’s regular positions. However, the only exception is the hedge. In case you have a broker that doesn’t allow you using portfolio leverage consider putting some capital aside.
Trade Execution
Prior to the market open of a new week I will publish the trades. That’s most likely Sunday’s. All regular trades are being executed at the OPEN using MarketOnOpen orders. The trades will be announced at this blog as well as on Twitter (@FrankHassler).
Performance
Consolidated performance reports will be released after each month.
Risk tolerance
The investor of Portfolio Trader has to have a high risk tolerance as the portfolio can undergo times of high volatility resulting in large draw-downs. The portfolio can be, but doesn’t have to be protected (hedged) all the time; hence it’s prone to sudden moves in either direction.
Broker
From September 2011 to March 2012 we had about 70 trades. For this reason tThe investor needs to consider a low-cost broker before actively following the suggested portfolio.
Volume
The focus is on trading index stocks and ETFs with high volume. The traded ETFs represent different asset classes such as commodities, international/regional/country stock indices, bonds, real estates etc. Portfolio Trader is trading long as well as short.
.The investor of Portfolio Trader has to have a high risk tolerance as the portfolio can undergo times of high volatility resulting in large draw-downs. The portfolio can be, but won’t be protected (hedged) all the time; hence it’s prone to sudden moves in either direction.
I think this is a very good idea, such service would be very useful for me.
Hello Frank,
It sounds very interesting. I’m looking forward to the possibility to trade your systems. I would appreciate if you could provide an overview with the backtesting results of the three systems upfront and I hope that European stocks are part of your systems.
Kind regards
David
Hello David,
Thanks for your feedback. Haven’t planed to post historical results.
The service is focused around US stocks and ETFs (for now).
Regards,
Frank
I think this would be a great service! It’s the dream of any working person to have a trading service that provides entry signals for the next day. Most of us cannot use the various real time services that are out there. As you write “free of charge until further notice”, I was wondering what kind of pricing you have in mind. I’m definitely willing to pay for a good service but my account is not big enough to pay 100s of dollars every month…
Hi Phil,
it needs to be affordable. Of course that’s a relative term, isn’t it
Haven’t thought about detailed pricing yet. First want to have a good product / service
Frank
Here’s a suggestion: just put a Paypal Donate-button on your page as long as you offer the service for free. I cannot speak for others but for me it would only be fair to donate some of the profits I make from your systems.
Hi Frank,
I very much enjoy reading your blog and programmed some of your systems in Excel VBA as well.
I would be very interested in this service. Hopefully you will add german stocks as well.
Best regards – this is really good work!
Joachim
Hello Joachim,
will focus on US stocks + ETFs for now.
Frank
Nice of you to make this available, Frank. I look forward to giving it a try.
This sounds very interesting.
Hi Frank,
Please count me in for the service. It would be nice to see historical performance of the strategies though – from psycology view point. I have enjoyed reading your posts and thanks for sharing.
Best regards
Asanka
Hi Frank
Count me in too. You work has been stellar so far and i have full faith it would continue to do so in the future.
As david has mentioned before it would be great if you could provide detailed backtesting results.
regards
Sunil
fantastic idea
Hi Frank,
Just discovered you. From what I’ve read so far and the responses from your followers, I’m glad I found you. Looking forward to your final product but from what you’ve laid out, it sounds terrific.
Congratulations Frank, I know this has been in the works for some time. Also, the site redesign looks very sharp. Excellent work all around, as usual. My best, Jeff