Insights

Risk Parity & Pension Portfolios: A Perfect Match

Geek Level: Read Time: The Speed Read: Growth sleeves within a pension’s asset-liability framework are built with the intention of improving funded status, but depending on the path of different macroeconomic drivers, these portfolios can lead to adverse outcomes due to risk mismatches. Key risks in future pension liabilities include growth (both wage and economic), […]

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Research

Risk Parity & Pension Portfolios: A Perfect Match

Geek Level: Read Time: The Speed Read: Growth sleeves within a pension’s asset-liability framework are built with the intention of improving funded status, but depending on the path of different macroeconomic drivers, these portfolios can lead to adverse outcomes due to risk mismatches. Key risks in future pension liabilities include growth (both wage and economic), […]

Make Sure the Free Lunch Isn’t Moldy

Speed Read: The concept of diversification has a long history and is often considered “the only free lunch” in investing. The benefits of diversification are well studied in academic literature, but in practice, correlations between traditional assets like stocks and bonds can change, affecting the effectiveness of diversification. The correlation between U.S. stocks and U.S. […]

“Peeky” Blinders

When individuals have uncertainty about a specific product or idea, they will often look to what their peer group is doing to help them decide. Social proof is a behavioural bias that can lead to decision making errors. By embracing a process-driven research flow to guard against behavioural biases and data peeking, Viewpoint can distinguish between true and false alpha.
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News & Insights

Funded Status: The Tip of the Risk Iceberg

The rise in interest rates over the past couple of years has caused many headaches for most investors. Stocks experienced significant losses last year, while bonds – normally seen as the safer part of a portfolio – suffered their worst performance in history. There has been almost no place to hide, aside from inflation hedges […]

Inflation & Bond Vigilantes

Back in August, when I wrote If It Isn’t Hurting, It Isn’t Working, there was a persistent belief that we had achieved either a “soft landing” or “no landing.”  Although these outcomes would be hard to differentiate, they both assume a “goldilocks” outcome where the Federal Reserve – and other global central banks – had […]

The Affirmation of James Carville

In 1994, James Carville, a political adviser to President Clinton, remarked, “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter.  But now I would like to come back as the bond market.  You can intimidate everybody.” Almost thirty […]
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White Paper

Revisiting Shrinkage: Covariance Matrix Estimation in the Modern Age

One of the great truisms in modelling is "garbage in, garbage out." In few places is that more important than in financial modelling.
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