Persistence-Based Capital Allocation along the FOMC Cycle

The Federal Reserve holds Federal Open Market Committee and Board Meetings, with six- and two-week cadence, respectively. The financial literature associates these meetings with stock market cycles of corresponding frequencies. These can be exploited through a portfolio strategy that invests in the market at alternate weeks. Since this strategy lacks theoretical foundations, we provide a rigorous framework for detecting market cycles and determining optimal portfolios that profit from them. We isolate uncorrelated components of stock returns associated with two- and six-week cycles, we replicate them and design an optimal portfolio that maximizes the investor’s wealth by properly exploiting such cyclicality.