Interest Rate Changes Exploitable for Sector Rotation?

A subscriber asked about a strategy that rotates among equity sectors according to changes in interests rate as set by Federal Reserve Bank monetary policy. To investigate, we consider the following nine sector Standard & Poor’s Depository Receipts (SPDR) exchange-traded funds (ETF):

Materials Select Sector SPDR (XLB)
Energy Select Sector SPDR (XLE)
Financial Select Sector SPDR (XLF)
Industrial Select Sector SPDR (XLI)
Technology Select Sector SPDR (XLK)
Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR (XLP)
Utilities Select Sector SPDR (XLU)
Health Care Select Sector SPDR (XLV)
Consumer Discretionary Select SPDR (XLY)

We use monthly effective federal funds rate (EFFR) as the interest rate. We consider two EFFR-based variables: (1) monthly change in EFFR; and, (2) 3-month slope of EFFR for signal smoothing. For each variable and each sector ETF, we consider two tests: (1) correlation of the variable with ETF return each of the next three months; and, (2) average next-month ETF returns across ranked fifths (quintiles) of the EFFR variable. The first test looks for linear relationships, and the second test looks for non-linear relationships. Measurements are at month ends, with a 1-day delay for ETF return calculations to ensure availability of EFFR data. Using monthly levels of EFFR since September 1998 and dividend-adjusted monthly levels of the above sector ETFs and of SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) since December 1998 (limited by sector ETFs), all through November 2021, we find that: (more…)