Our top 2017 investment strategies, year-to-date:

SPY, the S&P500 ETF, returned 6.97%.

Market comment:

As we are heading into early summer, most assets classes are performing well partly due to a weakening U.S. dollar. Domestic equity continues to reach new highs, foreign and emerging equity markets are up while junk bonds and foreign bonds have now recovered from past corrections. Commodity performance is mixed but commodities do present a longer term opportunity for portfolio unclusion, as inflation resistant assets. Treasuries remain flat. The story in the media is that we are entering a more mature business cycle in the U.S. while foreign markets (China, India, Brazil and partly Europe) are also in growth and recovery mode. The sentiment is positive, at least as far as the major management companies go while individual investors are cautious, expecting a possible U.S. equity correction. The year long expectation of higher volatility due to tighter policy still is discussed but we have not seen this in the actual market. Far from it, we are seeing extremely low volatility levels compared to historical norms as well as perceived political risk in the U.S. and Europe.

Our strategies performed as expected. Maximum Yield strategy added another 3.42% in April, keeping it in our top spot at +25.75 for the year.The Nasdaq 100 and the leveraged Universal Investment Strategy added 2.84% and 3.39% each, for a +18.26% and 16.86% YTD return respectively.

The rest of our strategies are all above 5%, with notable exception the GLD-USD strategy that remains flat. The “average” return an investor would achieve by weighting equally across our strategies would be 8.85%.

Our Bond Rotation strategy continues to be a solid performer returning +5.95% for the year. The BUG (our version of the enhanced Permanent Portfolios) reached 5.32%. It’s interesting to note that our leveraged Bug strategy is once again at 130% leverage and picking up a considerable allocation in gold.