ReSolve's Riffs

Brian is the Associate Director, Fixed-Income Strategies, Manager Research at Morningstar so we focused on the fixed income sleeve of portfolios. Specifically, we wanted to know how investors can generate the returns they need in a near-zirp world. Brian offered great color on the flawed construction of credit indices, and why this opens the door for outperformance by active credit managers.

As life expectancy increased throughout much of the past century, so did the importance of saving and growing one’s nest egg for retirement. Though most who retired during the last 40 years enjoyed a massive tailwind from stocks and bonds, those that switched from accumulating to drawing down their savings between 2000 and 2002 suffered a rude awakening.

Our guest this week was none other than Meb Faber (co-counder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management), a well-known quant and prominent member of the FinTwit community. In addition to being an asset manager, he is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, not to mention host of a popular podcast – and therefore an entertainer at heart.

he year that saw the fastest decline, followed by the steepest recovery in market history has left one topic top of mind for most investors – volatility. Though down from its eye-watering spike in the first quarter, the VIX (CBOE Volatility Index) has remained significantly higher than in previous years, and not without good reason.

Readers of our research (as well as any student of history) will know that stocks and bonds can go through prolonged periods of synchronized underperformance, while Risk Parity can navigate virtually any form of inflationary or growth shock. But when executed properly, with periodic rebalancing, Risk Parity can benefit from a substantial tailwind, as we showed in our recent paper – Maximizing the Rebalancing Premium.