The overview page has been updated to give a better description of each of these systems and my goals with them.

January was great from an absolute returns perspective, and the more aggressively allocated a system was, the better it did.  A7 Classic was the strongest performer among the unlevered systems with a 6.8% return.  I am very pleased to see A7 Smooth outperform the VT (All world stock index ETF) in January, because lest we lose sight of it, the basic goal of all of these systems is to participate in upside and mitigate losses.

My actual return of 10.7% is nice because this is the first month that I decided to crank up leverage in my personal account, and it’s always nice to start with a levered win instead of having to dig out of a hole.  That being said, I underperformed A7 Full Tilt by 0.8% percent, which feels like quite a wide margin.  (I used IYR calls instead of VNQ and Russell 2000 futures instead of IWM)

System Inception date Jan 2012 YTD 1 year
Ed’s Actual Results Jan 2012 10.7% 10.7%
Optimized Systems:
A7 Timid Dec 2010 4.1% 4.1% 14.5%
A7 Smooth Jan 2012 5.7% 5.7%
A7 Plus Jan 2012 5.3% 5.3%
A7 Full Tilt Jan 2012 11.5% 11.5%
A7 Composite Jan 2012 5.2% 5.2%
Internal Benchmarks:  Jan 2012  YTD  1 year
A7 Vanilla Jan 2012 2.0% 2.0%
A7 Classic Dec 2010 6.8% 6.8% 17.5%
External Benchmarks:  Jan 2012  YTD  1 year
50% SPY / 50% IEF 2.7% 2.7%  10.4%
GTAA 1.4% 1.4%  -3.8%
VT 5.5% 5.5%  -6.3%