Intelligent Portfolio Theory and Strength Investing in the Confluence of Business and Market Cycles and Sector and Location Rotations

This chapter presents the state of the art of the Intelligent Portfolio Theory which consists of three parts: the basic theory — principles and framework of intelligent portfolio management, the strength investing methodology as the driving engine, and the dynamic investability map in the confluence of business and market cycles and sector and location rotations. The theory is based on the tenet of “invest in trading” beyond “invest in assets”, distinguishing asset portfolio versus trading strategies and integrating them into a multi-asset portfolio which consists of many multi-strategy portfolios, one for each asset. The multi-asset portfolio is managed with an active portfolio management framework, where the asset allocation weights are dynamically estimated from a multi-factor model. The weighted investment on each single asset is then managed via a portfolio of trading strategies. Each trading strategy is itself a dynamically adapting trading agent with its own optimization mechanism. Strength investing as a methodology for asset selection with market timing focuses on dynamically tracing a small open cluster of assets which exhibit stronger trends and simultaneously follow trends of those assets, so to alleviate the drawbacks of single-asset trend following such as drawdown and stop loss. In the real world of global financial markets, the investability both in terms of asset selection and trade timing emerges in the confluence of business cycles and market cycles as well as the sector rotation for stock markets and location rotation for real estate markets.