Assessment of the Dragon Portfolio

A subscriber provided promotional materials for, and requested assessment of, the Artemis Capital Management Dragon portfolio. General allocations for this portfolio are:

• 24% to secular growth such as U.S. and international stocks.
• 21% to “long volatility and convex hedging” such as the Artemis Vega Fund and tail risk hedges (probably options and/or futures).
• 19% to commodity trend following.
• 18% to interest rate-sensitive assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) and investment grade bonds.
• 18% to inflation protection such as gold and potentially crypto-assets.

Apparently, the fund has not yet launched and all performance data are backtested (hypothetical). Lacking detail to replicate the Dragon portfolio, we look at its hypothetical monthly returns per promotional materials. We use a 60% SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY) – 40% iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond (TLT) portfolio, rebalanced monthly, as a simple hybrid benchmark. For reference, we also compare results for SPY, the Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy (SACEVS) Best Value portfolio and the Simple Asset Class ETF Momentum Strategy (SACEMS) equal-weighted (EW) Top 2 portfolio. Using gross monthly total returns for the Dragon portfolio, SPY, TLT, SACEVS Best Value and SACEMS EW Top 2 during January 2012 through April 2021, we find that: (more…)