Lesson 8 of 8
Running it
Nothing left to explain. What follows is the whole of the job.
Once, to start
Pick a strategy and open its page — if you have no preference, VAA is the one lesson 7 argued for. Under Today’s Decision the site computes the rule against live prices and prints what it says to hold. Buy that, in those proportions, and note the date. Starting mid-month puts you briefly off the rule’s calendar; the next month-end puts you back on it.
Once a month, after that
The rule settles at the month-end close and holds for the whole of the following month. So there is one moment that matters — the start of a month — and nothing to watch on any day inside it. What that moment costs you depends on which of the two you run it on.
This Site
- Open the strategy page on the first business day of a month, before the US market opens
- Compare what it prints to what you hold
- Trade only the difference — often nothing at all
- Write down the date and the allocation
- Close it, and open nothing until next month
The App
- Open it — any day, any hour
- Compare what it prints to what you hold
- Trade only the difference — often nothing at all
- Tick the month off
Why one list is longer
The first step is the site computing at today’s date. Before the US market opens on the first business day, the most recent close it can reach is the month-end you want; at any other hour it is printing a reading that is not in force. The app is built the other way round — the in-force allocation is what it opens on, and today’s recomputation sits behind a second tab that says so.
The last step is memory. The site does not know what you hold and will not remember you were here, so the written note is the only record there is. The app marks the month off per strategy and clears the mark when the month rolls over, which is also what stops you checking twice.
Neither one knows your holdings and neither places a trade. The middle steps are yours in both columns.
If you miss the date
Do not act on a fresher reading. A mid-month signal is a different rule from the one that was tested, and the next scheduled rebalance is already on its way. The site cannot show you the month-end you missed — it computes at today’s date only — so there the answer is to hold what you have until the next one. The app can: its Holding view is that reading, whatever day you open it.
One difference is not about steps at all. The site runs the papers’ original US ETF universe as published; the app maps every asset to a local UCITS alternative for readers outside the US, per lesson 5. Download on the App Store →
The part that is yours
This site states what published rules say on current prices. It is not advice, it does not know your circumstances, and no one here is regulated to give you any. The strategies were designed to limit how far a portfolio falls, and on the backtests their authors published they did — with the caveats lesson 6 set out. What happens from here is not in any of those tables.