Posts tagged equity sectors
Equity Sector Rotation Chartbook, February 2026 - The Tangible Economy Strikes Back

The February 2026 edition of the S&P 500 equity sector rotation chartbook can be found here You can read more about the methodology and underlying assets here.

The SaaSpocalypse is upon us and with it comes the inevitable soul searching among investors who thought that a concentrated bet on US/global tech was a never-losing source of excess returns relative to the wider market. This looks to me like a long overdue sell-off in search of a narrative rather than the other way round, but it’s a pretty compelling narrative, all the same.

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Equity sector rotation chartbook Aug 2025 - Order is restored, for now

As I wait for the September update of the OECD leading indicators—producing data for July and August—I thought I’d introduce another chartbook I've been working on, this time focused on equity sectors. It replicates a variation of a Bloomberg function I used to rely on when I had access to a terminal, the Relative Rotation Graphs - RRG. Since transitioning to Macrobond as the main source of data in my day job, I no longer look at this tool as frequently as I’d like. To that end, I’ve built my own version using the SPDR S&P 500 sector ETFs, and the SPY along with the VEU, to capture the relative performance of sectors and global equities. The total return data comes from Investing.com, where I have a personal premium subscription.

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Portfolio optimization with US large cap equity sectors

I am still in a quant-mood at the moment, so today I will go through some work I’ve done on portfolio optimization with US large cap equity sectors. I am doing this to augment my current MinVar framwork, which I use for my own investments. A quick re-cap on the basics of portfolio optimization, with advance apologies to PMs reading this and lamenting that I’ve missed something. Finance has two workhorse models; the tangent portfolio, which places the investor on the efficient frontier, where risk-adjusted return—or the Sharpe ratio—is maximised. Or the minimum variance portfolio, which offers exposure to the combination of assets with the lowest variance, or standard deviation, regardless of return. These portfolios often are estimated given a set of constraints, as I explain below. Assuming most portfolio allocation decisions start with one of these ideal models in mind—you either want to achieve the best risk adjusted return or the lowest volatility—the difference between the textbook models and real-time allocations is governed by the following layers of complexity.

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