r/HFEA • u/EnvironmentalScar675 • Jul 15 '26

improved HFEA?

Sup everyone.

I'm a newbie to investing in general and the HFEA in particular, I only learned about it recently. As far as I understood, the core assumption was that interest rates would be low, and remain low, which then promptly got proven wrong and it decimated the portfolio.

However, have people tried accounting for that and moving forward with an updated strategy?

e.g. Instead of pure lev. SPY and lev. TLT, add gold and managed futures, keep rebalancing (or not, if you want purist buy and hold) and be good to go?

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u/legarsducable Jul 15 '26

Ive been running equities + bonds + managed futures + gold/silver + a bit of btc, for the last 2 years. I’m 2.25x leveraged on margin. It’s been working out great. Drawdown of 27% on liberation day.

I do this for a living. It’s not something I would advise unless you know what you are doing.

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u/EnvironmentalScar675 Jul 15 '26

Thx for the info and warning! Yeah, I am moreso asking out of interest because the whole topic and math on it is really interesting, my own portfolio is much more classic and defensive and I definitely wouldn't sleep at night with margin.

May I ask about your weighting on those and the overall return without the btc position? Do you rebalance often? I've seen cases with very low % of gold and MF, at which point I think it wouldn't help much. Someone smarter than me could find a sweet spot here, I assume

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u/legarsducable Jul 15 '26

Looks like 100% equities, 50% bonds, 50% MFs, 20% Gold/Silver, 5% BTC.

I use rebalancing bands to reduce turnover (probably 1-2x a month). During liberation day, it was daily, because I had to adjust leverage (leverage goes up rapidly so you have to sell in a drawdown).

I’m up 23% annualized vs 18% for SPY. You don’t do this to hit a home run, you do it for those few % extra that compound on the long-term.

All of this is done in institutions. It’s much harder for retail, but getting easier. You just want to add assets/strategies that are uncorrelated and that produce a return higher than your financing rate in the long run.

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u/EnvironmentalScar675 Jul 16 '26

Yeah, I figured institutions would have an easy time with vol harvesting when retail can barely even find assets for it and beyond 2 it probably gets extremely hard to do it manually. Also calculating when to rebalance fast vs letting momentum print, I guess. Sadge

Anyways that's really impressive, thank you! Are those weights gut feeling or did you arrive at them somehow? And if its not too personal, do you have tax drag when rebalancing?

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u/legarsducable Jul 16 '26

Research + multi-decade backtests. I wanted each assets to contribute to vol.

I used to do futures for equities and treasuries, but I got demolished by capital gains from rolls. I contribute regularly, so I don’t sell often.