It has been a modeling marathon of sorts here for about a week and this, compounded by an onslaught of technical problems that were astounding even by our standards, has kept us from posting sooner.

But as promised, we want to provide a brief description of this Web site and our analytical philosophy.

The elevator pitch: This site describes an intermarket, style-variable investment strategy based on Stracia, a decision-making framework for global portfolio management. We analyze worldwide equity, fixed-income, futures, commodities, currency, and derivatives markets for trading and investment opportunities, and share whatever analysis or observations may strike us in the form of comments, files available for download (models and exhibits), and soon, global portfolios. (For now, the main forum is this public blog, though we are toying with the idea of offering a private discussion forum at some point.)

Stracia (we say it STRAY-see-uh, but what do we know) stands for strategic, cross-category investment allocation. It is a collection of processes and formalized strategies designed to determine optimal thresholds for the rotation of assets among categories, as well as the timing of such decisions. The implementation of these processes is based on a framework or philosophy for analyzing the markets. Proprietary models and algorithms are a part of this process, but Stracia is far from being a “golden key” or mechanized trading system.

Rather, Stracia represents the practical application of sound macroeconomic and “macro-market” theories, which will be described over time and at length on this Web site and in various of the blog entries. Its focus is on (i) learning to anticipate directionality in these markets as a preliminary step to (ii) evaluating long/short investment decisions based on (iii) intrinsic-value analyses and, to a lesser extent, (iv) short-term momentum considerations.

Most importantly, Stracia provides a context in which to understand and react to changing macroeconomic and market dynamics on a continuous basis, due to its grasp of both historical market phenomena and practical applications of theory informing performance expectations. Stracia is therefore a probative analysis of what works over the course of an investment cycle; an intellectual framework that explains why; and a process for managing all of the information necessary to make sound, well-informed investment decisions supporting a multi-cap, multi-strategy, style-variable, international approach. And like portfolio management itself, it is a work in progress. We hope to share the development of the system and more about the philosophy underlying it even as we go.

Baines has been complaining about the length of these posts, among other things, so we will keep this one short. More on the investment philosophy and a look at some of the actual models in posts to come. ♦