Consistent with misapprehensions expressed during other recent market crises, there has been a chorus of alarmist speculation about the actions and state of risk-parity strategies during the current crash. We felt it would be helpful to revisit the concept of risk parity and take a snapshot of how a typical global risk parity strategy might have been expected to behave this year.
We’ve spent a great deal of time in past articles discussing the merits of portfolio optimization. In this article we will examine the merits and challenges of portfolio optimization in the context of one of the most challenging investment universes: managed futures.
Our whitepaper “The Optimization Machine: A General Framework for Portfolio Choice” presented a logical framework for thinking about portfolio optimization given specific assumptions regarding expected relationships between risk and return. We explored the fundamental roots of common portfolio …
In 2008 Warren Buffett proposed a public bet that actively managed investment products, plagued by high fees, would not live up to the goal of beating a passive investment in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF over the subsequent decade. Only one person had the intellectual conviction to represent the …
The goal of this article is to summarize the complex dynamics that drive asset returns. You’ll discover that asset returns are impacted by four sources of risk. Two of these risks affect all assets in the same way, and therefore are undiversifiable. The other two risks …
Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently released a research note suggesting that Risk Parity investment strategies currently represent a substantial source of systematic risk in global markets. The note was picked up breathlessly by several media outlets and posted under …
