Cancellation of Strategy Subscription

Q: "I want to cancel my subscription." 

A: Investors cancel their subscription for many reasons, including a change in the life-circumstances that were driving their previous investment objectives. A typical life-circumstance change might be retirement, in which an investor morphs from contributing to their portfolio — to withdrawing from their portfolio.

However, if you are canceling because of recent underperformance of your model, you may wish to rethink that decision! Here's why:

The most significant characteristic of equity and bond market price series is that they are mean-reverting. Mean Reversion is the most powerful force in investing!

Investment price series move in cycles called Sine Waves—moving above and below a long-term mean (or average) with a trend that generally follows the trend of the fundamentals for that series. For example, the S&P 500 Index (America's largest publicly traded companies) generally has an uptrending price series because the US and world economy continues to grow each year. 

Because of the fractal nature of the stock market, every stock, ETF, or even investment approaches (e.g., growth vs. value) will move in Sine Waves of varying length. Some waves have time-frames measured in days or hours, while others have waves measured in weeks, months, years and even decades.

Because of the dominant, wave-like quality of investment price series, there will be times when your model will underperform its benchmark and times when it will outperform. Your model is targeting the long-term average of the index, ETF, or strategy, while prices have moved to an extreme high of the wave function, far above the model's long-term mean price—or alternatively far below its mean price.

The automated investment decisions of our models are based on the long-term mean of a composite of indicators. However, there will be occasions in which the price series doesn't closely follow the long-term mean. The mean acts like a gravitational force on prices, but the powerful emotional forces of greed or fear can temporarily overpower the mean-price gravity.

Overheated conditions almost always resolve with a reversion of prices back to the mean (i.e., its long-term average). Therefore, if you just stay with your model after a period of losses, there is a high probability you'll see a sharp increase in strategy performance that more than offsets the previous, temporary cycle underperformance.

Also, since there are short-term, medium-term, and long-term waves in dynamical markets, this reversion back to the mean may not happen overnight. If it's a long-term wave that's having the greatest effect, your strategy may experience a long-term divergence away from its mean that requires weeks or months to resolve.

One well-proven investment principle is that investors who chase performance, skipping around from one best-performing strategy to the next, invariably underperform the market.

By constantly chasing performance, the untethered investor is always selling at the low of his current position or approach—and then buying a new position or engaging in an alternative investment approach at the high of the Sine Wave for that position/approach. After buying at the high, there's a high probability the wave will soon turn down, the investor will sell again, and the process will repeat.

This investor pathology can be characterized as "Selling Low and Buying High," the opposite of a successful investment approach.

If you just have patience, there is a high probability that your model will return to its historical long-term outperformance of its benchmark.

How to Cancel

If you've considered the information above and still wish to cancel, here are the steps to do so:

1) Log in to the password-protected Subscriber Area of ETFOptimize at THIS LINK. 

2) Scroll downward past the Notification message at the top of the Subscriber Menu page to the actual subscriber's menu in the lower portion of this page.

3) The top set of links is labeled "Active Subscription," showing each strategy to which you have a subscription. Your menu will appear similar to this example subscriber's menu, which contains links to three Premium Strategies:

4) Notice that following the next billing date information, there is a link that says “cancel.” To cancel a subscription, click this link, follow the instructions, and confirm you wish to cancel.

Price Increases: Please keep in mind that we have raised rates three times in the last two years to balance out the forces of demand. Should you cancel now, if you wish to come back in the future, your subscription cost may be higher than the amount you're paying now.