Browsing: Risk Metrics and Measurement

Mean variance optimization (MVO) is a simple, yet well-regarded asset allocation technique designed to create a portfolio that maximizes it’s expected level of return for a given level of standard deviation. Many institutions construct diversified portfolios using this simple technique, attempting to maximize their risk-adjusted returns. While popular with manyRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM & Hossein Kazemi, PhD, CFA, CAIA Association & CISDM This is a summary of the editor’s letter originally published in the Volume 8, Issue 4 of the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, a journal published by CAIA Association. The Problem with Studies Many studies onRead More

Matthew X. Hanauer and Steffen Windmueller, two scholars affiliated with the Technical University of Munich, compare the performance of three risk management approaches applicable to the momentum strategy. Their new paper also explores the risk management techniques available for hedge fund managers and others who pursue a momentum strategy. ARead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Some investment products and strategies can be considered toxic given their history on Wall Street. Portfolio insurance is rarely used in marketing materials, given its role in the 1987 stock market crash. CDO-Squared instruments and structured investment vehicles (SIVs) are also unlikely toRead More

Milind Sharma and Aravind Ganesan have developed what they call the QMIT Leveraged Buyout Model—a trading strategy—based on anticipating announcements of LBOs based on QMIT’s factor library. Sharma is the CEO of QMIT, QuantZ Machine Intelligence Technologies. QMIT is itself a spin-off from QuantZ Capital, which is a stat arbRead More

A new paper takes an experimental look at “Active Risk Budgeting,” a method of portfolio construction that looks to build upon older and sometimes passive risk budgeting approaches, adding enough active management to allow the risk budget to change over time. For example, an institution might want its risk budgetRead More

The Sharpe ratio has long served as a simple but important item in the due diligence tool kit. Formulated by William F. Sharpe in 1966 and first called the “reward to variability” ratio, the number arises from an investment’s rate of return minus the risk-free rate divided by the standardRead More

By standard definition, “ambiguity aversion” is the preference for known risks over unknown risks, the known unknowns over the unknown unknowns. A recent paper discusses the portfolio-level consequences of this aversion. The paper, written by Valery Polkovnichenko and Hui (Grace) Wang, explains that for an ambiguity-neutral investor, “adding active portfolio withRead More

Algorithmic trading may fairly be said to have conquered the public equities world, although there are still pockets of resistance and related controversies. The robots have now turned their attention to the bond markets. Bond markets are different from stock markets in a lot of ways, and many of theseRead More

GARCH (Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity) models are very useful for estimating the volatility for a lot of more traditional assets (stocks and bonds) and their indices, which is why they’ve been around since the 1980s. But when they’re used for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin they yield incorrect predictions forRead More

Two scholars, Shubeur Rahman and Ranjan Bhaduri, have in a new paper taken a fresh look at a long-standing dilemma in the alternative investments industry. The question is: how should investors in hedge funds (especially in a multi-asset class, multi-strategy portfolio of hedge funds) measure the market risk inherent inRead More

I write these words soon after reading the news from Sundra Strait, Indonesia. In recent days, the eruption and collapse of a volcano there has set off a tsunami that in turn has devastated the coastal regions of Banten and Lampung, also in Indonesia. Much time may have to passRead More

A new white paper from New York Life looks at the role of alternatives in portfolio construction and argues that usual risk-return based approaches can underestimate risk and lead to over-allocation to the alternatives. The paper, by Amit Soni, an NYL portfolio manager, proposes a new method “to quantify performanceRead More

By Amit Soni, Portfolio Manager, Strategic Asset Allocation, New York Life Investments Lofty valuations in traditional assets have encouraged investors to explore alternatives. Unfortunately, the lack of a holistic investment framework to incorporate alternatives poses a challenge. Traditional risk-return based approaches, alone, over-allocate to alternatives–a result of underestimation of risksRead More

Glassbridge has put out an ambitious white paper about the “evolution of asset allocation across the investment management industry,” one that begins with the basics of the Capital Asset Pricing Model and ends with quantitative analysis and crowdsourcing. The premise is that new strategies, and new ranges of data, areRead More

By Tom Keck, Partner & Head of Research; Lisa Larsson, Vice President, Research Researchers at StepStone Group, a global private markets firm, recently released a white paper that puts the illiquidity of private equity into perspective. A fund’s life they reckon is too coarse a measure; the picture comes into focusRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association The quote “what gets measured gets managed” is oft-times attributed to the author and consultant Peter Drucker. The origin is less significant than its modern-day meaning and, while it is most often used in the context of business management, it ports quite well into the management ofRead More

A new study of volatility in commodity prices indicates that both the total and the decomposed variance risk premiums of at least certain commodities markets contain information with predictive power. The variance risk premium is the pay-off of the synthetic variance swap contract. Specifically, it’s the difference between the floatingRead More

Greenwich Associates has produced research, commissioned by the Options Industry Council, about the way institutional investors understand exchange listed options. Greenwich concludes that underperforming institutions, including pension plans and endowments, “should be considering investments in options strategies as a means to improve risk-adjusted returns.” Institutions not currently doing so mayRead More

Roberto Obregon, of the Meketa Investment Group, has written a paper (available at SSRN) on the use of options-based equity strategies. Obregon is the author of a number of scholarly papers on alternative strategies, including one last fall on global macro, which he co-authored with Willam Dana. In his optionsRead More

The Association of Finance Professionals recently disclosed, via its Corporate Cash Indicators, that U.S. corporations accumulated more cash in the third quarter of 2017 than had been anticipated. This is consistent with other indications: corporations are concerned about the risks of the present environment and are working to ensure theyRead More

A creation of the mid-1980s, the London Interbank Offered rate (LIBOR) became immensely influential over the three decades that followed. It became a reference rate for both finance and commerce for the rate of nearly risk-free interest, and in the process it spawned other IBORs, including EURIBOR and Japan’s TIBOR.Read More

New research by the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA), in collaboration with Preqin, indicates that hedge funds have produced “more consistent and steadier returns than equities or bonds over both the short term and the long term.” The study employed four scales of time: one year, three, five, and 10Read More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association Warren Buffett cashed out his bet and the final numbers are in courtesy of the Oracle’s annual shareholder letter. Unfortunately, the most important investment lessons have been completely lost, as the media and the investment sage have mostly used this as an opportunity toRead More

Vineer Bhansali and Lawrence Harris have written a scholarly paper on what they call the “extraordinary growth of short volatility strategies” since late 2010. A lot of people and institutions seem to have come to the conclusion that spiking volatility is just that. A “spike” on a chart is definitionallyRead More

The data and analysis provider eVestment has issued a new white paper on “enhancing private equity manager selection with deeper data.” PE funds below the top quartile have not materially outperformed the public markets as a matter of history. So for an institutional investor, earning alpha is in large measureRead More

Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 1, Issue 4 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA Membership while archived issues are available to the public in the Perspectives section atRead More