Local currency emerging market debt funds have enjoyed robust asset growth in recent years as the investable universe has expanded and liquidity has sharply improved. This growing asset class provides diversification benefits and an attractive risk/reward profile for fixed-income and multi-asset portfolios.
The second quarter played out close to expectations with weak market returns, few unanticipated shocks, and investor worries never escalating to panic. Expectations for capital market returns are now lower, although emerging markets offer growth for patient investors, real assets are a hedge against further monetary devaluation, and the environment...
Index-based global portfolios may offer a more efficient way to capture exposure to developed and emerging markets than having separate portfolios for each of the two. By consolidating these two market segments into a single integrated portfolio, investors benefit from lower portfolio turnover and reduced operating costs.
It will take years for state and local governments to return to pre-recession fiscal health. And yet, despite ongoing struggles, financial risks appear to be stabilizing. The mechanisms that state and city issuers have in place – particularly the balanced budget requirement, powers of taxation, and independent treasury management – are working as i...
Tail risk can be reduced by improving a portfolio's overall risk-return characteristics. Often this approach will blend several distinct strategies: broader diversification, volatility-based risk management, and drawdown control, perhaps combined with active management strategies such as managed futures or low-beta equities.
The authors examine a range of topics, including the narrowing gap between returns on different asset classes, signs of the coming economic upturn, the strategy of alternating between risk-on and risk-off modes, inflation and economic crises around the world, performance of specific asset classes, and innovation as China's next growth driver.
Investors face choices about how much to allocate across the liquidity spectrum of public equity, hedge funds, and private markets. The author outlines the benefits and costs in providing a framework for allocating across those three levels of liquidity when investing in equity markets for commodity producers.
Investors buy gold out of fear that the economic and political infrastructure we count on when we buy stocks and bonds is degrading. And gold booms inevitably end with a bust. The better strategy may be to build a reasonably sized position in diversified commodities, including gold; play close attention to sound entry points; and rebalance religiou...
Concerns about excess government debt and inflation have increased interest in gold and raised its price. Gold is a commodity that behaves more like a currency, providing no investment return beyond price fluctuation. Gold's high price undermines its protective characteristics, making it more vulnerable to declines as monetary policy normalizes.
This paper from AQR Capital Management helps demystify managed futures, one of the few investments that performed well in 2008. The authors describe how to construct a simple version of this strategy, illustrate how this simple version performs in various market environments, and show how managed futures can be used to enhance the risk-return profi...
The authors contend that there is a better approach than the Sharpe ratio or mean variance optimization (MVO) with respect to hedge fund portfolio analysis: the Omega equation. In their view the equation that adds to mean and variance, captures all of the higher moment information in the return distribution, incorporates sensitivity to return leve...
Pre-IPO investing is one of the themes in the market today. There are in London many, many firms dedicated to the sales of shares in this area. It is often said that pre-ipo investing should be avoided as anything worth buying does not need to be sold.
Family offices have been increasing their allocations to private equity and this trend is likely to continue, according to a new study by the European Venture Capital and Private Equity Association and the IMD Business School of Lausanne. The average allocation to private equity by the offices interviewed was 12 per cent, with the highest commitmen...
Deutsche Bank research suggests that microfinance is growing in attractiveness for private sector investors. The report, entitled "Microfinance: An emerging investment opportunity," represents the first formal research paper on microfinance investments produced by a major financial institution. The study suggests that microfinance will evolve into ...
This paper investigates the case for global investing, to examine why it is that so many American investors underweight foreign stocks, and to suggest a sensible middle ground between true global investing and the current home country bias that infects most portfolios.