William Sharpe's Adaptive Asset Allocation

Just read William Sharpe's article in the latest FAJ and it seems like an interesting idea, Adaptive Asset Allocation or the concept of adapting a static asset allocation to the current market conditions based on the conditions in place when the allocation policy was determined. It frees the investor from having to rebalance as the market moves, though it seems like the literature has a lot to say about the value of rebalancing. Sharpe calls that a contrarian strategy, buying losers and selling winners and that certainly seems correct. He makes some good arguments that it cannot be an equilibrium strategy, if everybody tried to sell the latest winners or buy the loser it the market wouldn't clear. There needs to be a mix of momentum investors in order to keep the market liquid. Being an equilibrium type this argument is appealing to me on some level.

Didn't see any historical results in the paper, so I guess that has been left up to somebody else to run the analysis and see how the Adaptive Asset Allocation process works over time in order to really judge it.

I am still digesting MarkKritzman's article in the March/April FAJ which told us about the 1/N fallacy. He did lots of historical analysis and showed several portfolios beating the market portfolio and I expect that they made use of rebalancing, but he didn't spend a lot of time on simple 60/40 type portfolios.