Smooth Sailing Indexes
Leading provider of tactical, factored, smart alpha, licensed trading strategies & research
Innovative portfolio management tools for financial institutions
Smooth Sailing Indexes, Inc. has a proven track record of licensing tactical strategies to financial institutions as a benefit for their clients. Each strategy has produced consistent returns while reducing risk for investment portfolios. The strategies offer capacity and easy implementation for issuers and managers of mutual funds, ETF's, hedge funds, TAMPS, and other financial platforms. Smooth Sailing also creates custom strategies for institutional managers.
Smooth Sailing Index story and purpose
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The two principals of Smooth Sailing Indexes bring a combined 72 years of experience in the financial services industry (though they still like to think of themselves as youngsters). Their backgrounds emphasize indexed products and portfolio strategies designed for financial professionals.
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When selecting a name for the company, they wanted it to reflect the key qualitative techniques embedded in their indexes. These techniques are designed to help licensed financial professionals confidently develop 40-Act products or receive signals for their SMA client portfolios.
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Each index is built using logic intended to perform in an “all-weather” manner. In other words, the goal is to navigate a wide range of market environments and deliver consistent results across market and business cycles. Hence the name, Smooth Sailing.
Protect – each index is designed to be mostly “risk off” during harsh bond market declines. By attempting to have shallow declines during large market drawdowns, licensee’s can be assured their 40 ACT or SMA portfolios are not simply taking the plunge like their competitors who have passive or active (but with a fully invested mandate) products. Additionally, there is less strain to work towards the high watermark after a meaningful decline.
Return seeking – each index is designed to participate “risk on” when positive trends appear to be confirmed after a meaningful decline. "Risk on" participation continues until those positive trends appear to be weakening.
Opportunistic allocations – each index has a universe that re-allocates at the end of each day or each week. This re-allocation process is designed to seek alpha during trending periods by allocating to tickers that are chosen based on index metrics and discarding tickers that are not.
Volatility management – each index is designed to reduce volatility substantially during harsh bond market conditions by simply being “risk off.” Additionally, by incrementally reducing index exposure during deteriorating periods or incrementally increasing index exposure during re-inflating periods, the overall volatility profile is substantially reduced over a complete market cycle.
Equal weighting – during the allocation process of each index, an equal weighted methodology is used to further disperse opportunity and risk over a complete business cycle. Historically, equal weighting methodologies have outperformed cap weighted and/or over biased allocations. Also, it makes it very easy for an end-user to implement for their fund or clients.
Nimble – each index is a factored, frequently re-allocated entity with built-in flexibility to reduce or increase risk, participate either “risk on” or “risk off.” We believe this nimbleness is paramount in complete market and business cycles.