Effective 2025,  The Triopay Unit Trust has been renamed the Mirador Income and Stability Fund.  This name more accurately conveys the fund’s true objective, purpose and benefits. Likewise, any referral to a Triopay process, system, or program etc. refers to the Mirador Income and Stability process, system, or program etc..

Mirador Real Advice Blog

Time as a Continuum

By Stan Clarke, February 2025

The investment industry regulators are required to develop standards that can easily be followed by the industry members and well understood by the investment public.  For this reason, they have developed strict regulations about performance reporting that deal with time frames like calendar months, quarters and years.  Mirador remains dedicated to adhering to the regulator’s requirements, and we take it to a higher level for a number of good reasons.  But first, let’s address and debunk how some people seem to think calendar time measures can be used in money management.

Anyone with a detailed database of market returns for different time frames might identify if there are calendar correlated patterns in pricing.  This is often called data mining.  The danger is that correlation does not often imply causality. One of the most popular of these patterns used to be seasonal biases – “Sell in May and Stay Away” identified a pattern of stocks doing better in the November through May period of the year.  But this does not always happen, and the pattern strength has severely diminished in the last decade. Managing money with calendar-based data-mining rhymes has not been a good long-term portfolio management practice.

Year-end market movements can be affected by tax motivated transactions that are not necessarily related to investment merits. Similarly, quarter-ends can have price distortions as money managers “window-dress” their portfolio in time for quarterly portfolio reporting – perhaps dumping losers and sometimes returning asset allocation back to the requirements of their mandate.  Being obsessed with these point-in-time numbers will not likely lead to significantly better long-term results.  I believe portfolio managers are better to spend time optimizing their portfolio for “continuous” time.  Significantly altering portfolio holdings before and after a quarter-end seem dishonest to me and I think it’s like picking up short-term dimes in front of a continuous time bulldozer.

Overall, the markets don’t know what day, week, year, month or quarter it is.  “Mr. Market” does not differentiate January 31st from July 1st.  To him (or her), they are all just days in a continuum.  Markets movements are the day-to-day results of imbalances between buyers and sellers.  Trends are the summation of the continuum of days.  The daily reasons for buying or selling are not often about some point-in-time calendar measures; hence, portfolio management should not waste time on such efforts.

Lastly, peaks and troughs rarely occur at the change of a time interval like the beginning of a month, quarter or year.  Hence, using only these calendar time intervals does not paint the best picture of a portfolio’s performance or volatility.  For this reason, Mirador also uses measures like drawdown, “the decline from the most recent peak”, not the decline in a calendar period, to better measure a portfolio’s risk and stability.

It is much more informative for investors and managers to continually evaluate the results using rolling periods of time.  Mirador has developed a detailed database of rolling returns for the Mirador Income and Stability Fund, the fund’s benchmark, and the benchmark components.  We track the following rolling time frames on a weekly basis:

  1. 5 days (1 week)
  2. 4 weeks (1 month)
  3. 12 weeks (1 quarter)
  4. 26 weeks (1/2 year)
  5. 52 weeks (1 year)


Friday, we know how everything has performed over the prior week, month, quarter, ½ year, and year.  These are the periods previous to that Friday – not the actual calendar month, quarter, ½ year, and year.  For example, we don’t wait until the month end to “know how the last month has been”.  Using rolling returns, there are 52 prior month-end results in every year.  Every week, we know how the prior 4 weeks have been.  The same applies to the other periods – we see 52 of every period, every year.  Every Friday is like a year end!

Now, this is what is most important – using rolling time frames creates an incredible portfolio management tool.  A change in more than one shorter rolling period is often an early warning signal that might require some additional research to ascertain if it might roll into a longer time frame and affect portfolio results significantly.  This research could lead to a timely change in the portfolio mix.  Waiting for a period ending interval to do this might be too late and reduce the longer-term benefits of the change.  A recent example was the improving shorter term rolling periods of our bond benchmark, that led us to increase our fixed income allocations 3 times in the last 2 years.  

Rolling time frames keeps our focus steady and continuous – much more than using arbitrary point-in-time, calendar-based measures.

For more information, call me at 403-718-0125, email me at [email protected].