By far the greatest source of personal consternation as a professional in markets is investors’ obsession with finding the best stocks, or the best stock pickers. The fact that investors pursue this objective at all undermines all meaningful arguments about efficient markets.
When we left off in Part 1, we promised to examine how select Global Tactical Asset Allocation products stack up against the Global Market Portfolio from the perspective of several performance measures – particularly Sharpe ratio, alpha and information ratio.
Grinold linked investment alpha and Information Ratio to the breadth of independent active bets in an investment universe with his Fundamental Law of Active Management. Breadth is often misinterpreted as the number of eligible securities in a manager’s investment universe, but this ignores the impact of correlation.
Systematic researchers overwhelmingly use monthly holding periods to test strategies. This is probably driven by the availability of long-term monthly total return data for a wide variety of indexes, where daily data is more scarce. This is fine to a point, but investors may not be aware of just how sensitive results might be to day-of-the-month effects which may not persist out of sample.
To be crystal clear, our discussion will NOT focus on trying to identify which signals or parameters, or combinations of signals and parameters, are better or worse than others. While most quants – being tinkerers at heart – waste most of their time fine-tuning the parameters of …
So far, we’ve discussed the importance of investment universe selection and price momentum in designing a robust asset allocation methodology. If you haven’t read those articles, we would strongly encourage you to do so before proceeding with this one. We lay most of the …
The balance of this series will present ways to harness the momentum effect across global asset classes. The strategies we present will be long-only because such approaches harness two major sources of return: the long-term premia derived from exposure to risky assets …
In this series, we deep dive into the fundamentals of Adaptive Asset Allocation. Provide an intuitive baseline for Global Tactical Asset Allocation strategies in general.
ReSolve Asset Management Blog is an investment research forum, opinion pieces, and educational material from the team at ReSolve Asset Management. Our views are driven by evidence based finance, with a special focus on asset allocation, factors and smart beta, retirement and endowment strategies, and quantitative methods.
