A fully technical S&P 500 market timer using a novel three-horizon trend analysis to identify sustained market movements, reduce exposure during declining markets and participate in rising markets — with relatively infrequent trading.
Investing in the stock market can deliver attractive long-term returns, but major market crashes can wipe out years of gains.
The challenge is not simply to make money in rising markets, but to protect your capital when markets turn down.
The iM-DrawdownShieldis designed to do both. It follows the S&P 500 during favourable market conditions and switches to defensive investments when the risk of a sustained decline increases. Its objective is to reduce major losses without sacrificing long-term investment performance.
In a historical simulation covering 1995–2026, the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) experienced a maximum drawdown of 55.2%. The model’s dynamically selected Treasury ETF strategy reduced this to 19.6%, while achieving an annualised return of 12.1%, compared with 11.0% for SPY.
The S&P 500 averaged 6,736 for October 2025, 2,604 points above its long-term trend of 4,132, implying a 39% decline to reach the trend and signifying a valuation substantially above historic norm.
The long-term trend indicates a forward 10-year annualized real return of only 1.4%, while the CAPE-MA35 methodology derived 10-year annualized real return is also modest at about 4.3%, indicating limited long-term upside.
The short-term outlook indicated by CAPE-MA35 Neutral phase has historically yielded low short-term returns.
This is a dynamic ETF allocation strategy using the CAPE-MA35 ratio—the Shiller CAPE divided by its 35-year moving average—to identify market phases and adjust portfolio exposure.
The model defines four primary phases with respective ETFs—Growth (QQQ), Defensive (GLD, XLU), Uptrend (QQQ, XLE), and Downtrend (GLD)—based on the trend and relative valuation of CAPE-MA35. ETF allocations are adjusted monthly in response to these phases.
Backtesting from 1999 to 2025 shows the model outperforms SPY with 20.1% annualized returns, lower drawdowns, and consistent long-term performance with low turnover.
The strategy offers a practical, rules-based approach to market timing, blending long-term valuation with trend analysis for superior risk-adjusted returns.
This study presents a rules-based ETF allocation model that uses the CAPE-MA35 ratio—the Shiller CAPE divided by its 35-year moving average—to identify distinct market phases and dynamically adjust portfolio exposure.
The model defines four primary phases—Growth, Defensive, Uptrend, and Downtrend—based on the trend and relative valuation of CAPE-MA35. ETF allocations are adjusted monthly in response to these phases.
The average of S&P 500 for March 2025 was 5,680, declining to 5,074 by April 4, 2025 (now 13% up from Jul-2023 average of 4,497 when forward returns for stocks “looked reasonably good” according to this analysis).
The S&P 500 is still 1,140 points higher than the corresponding long-term trend value of 3,934 for April 2025.
For the S&P 500 to reach the corresponding long-trend value would entail a 22% decline from the April 4, 2025 value, indicating that the S&P 500 is still considerably overvalued.
Assuming that the current S&P 500 value remains unchanged until the end of April, then the CAPE-ratio would be 31.0, 15% higher than its 35-year moving average (MA35), currently at 26.9.
The long-term trend indicates a forward 10-year annualized real return of 4.0%, while the CAPE-MA35 methodology derived 10-year annualized real return is better at about 6.7%.
With reference to Section 202(a)(11)(D) of the Investment Advisers Act:
We are Engineers and not Investment Advisers,
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