Ciovacco Capital Management

Ciovacco Capital Management

Chris Ciovacco founded the firm in Atlanta in 1999, evolving a retail advisory practice into a registered investment adviser focused entirely on global macro strategy. Where many RIAs build portfolios stock-by-stock, Ciovacco constructed a rule-based system that interprets central-bank policy, credit spreads, and intermarket momentum to shift across equities, fixed income, commodities, and cash. The firm has operated for more than two decades, long enough to have navigated the dot-com drawdown, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Covid dislocation. The investment engine centers on what Ciovacco calls the "Global Multi-Asset» momentum strategy. Instead of picking individual names, the firm uses broad ETFs — tracking the S&P 500, Treasury bonds, gold, and sectors such as technology or energy — and adjusts exposure based on quantitative risk-on/risk-off models. The approach blends trend-following with a top-down macroeconomic overlay. During risk-on regimes, the portfolio tilts toward US large-cap growth and cyclical sectors. When the models turn defensive, allocations rotate into long-duration Treasuries, gold, or cash equivalents. The firm publishes its tactical research weekly through a widely read Seeking Alpha column and its own YouTube channel, where Ciovacco walks through yield charts, credit-market signals, and the Federal Reserve's posture (per Seeking Alpha, ongoing). The firm remains deliberately lean — Ciovacco is the public face and primary strategist — and does not disclose assets under management. In May 2024, Ciovacco published a note arguing that a sustained break in the 10-year Treasury yield above 4.5% would signal a regime change for risk assets, reinforcing the strategy's reliance on bond-market signals as the primary risk barometer (per Seeking Alpha, May 2024). Ciovacco Capital Management's structural differentiator is its think-tank intensity packaged as an RIA. Rather than a traditional multi-asset manager, the firm functions as a continuous macro-research operation that executes through liquid exchange-traded products. Every week the firm publicly shares the very charts and reasoning that drive its discretionary overlay, creating a real-time audit trail that most RIAs or hedge funds never provide. The model portfolio and research output are inseparable — the same analysis that drives the client accounts also feeds the public commentary, giving the firm a transparent, narrative-heavy identity uncommon among systematic macro managers.