The traditional 60/40 balanced portfolio is no stranger to coming under fire. Many pundits have decreed the death of the balanced portfolio, arguing that a low yield environment will prove insurmountable and bonds will no longer be able to provide necessary diversification for investor portfolios. This proclamation has yet to be proven correct, and in the investment management industry, being too early is the same thing as being wrong. That being said, is this time different?
Tag: Risk
Rewiring Your Amygdala: The Practical Application of Trend in an Investment Portfolio
When an individual contemplates whether they want to make an investment, generally the first thoughts revolve around return expectations. If I am willing to invest in a company, either through debt or equity, what is my expected return, and is the return enough for me to feel comfortable with the risk of supplying capital to that company?
Know When to Hold’em, Know When to Fold’em
BLOG SERIES: RISK PARITY
In the second installment of this blog series on risk parity, we are going to dive into how dynamically adjusting the leverage applied to the strategy can result in increased stability of the portfolio’s return profile. Actively adjusting the amount of leverage applied to the portfolio is how the strategy scales the size of its bets based on changes in market risk.
The Impacts of Risk Parity Strategies
Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater is the latest celebrity investment management firm to opine that in a low-interest rate environment government bonds not only offer little in the way of value for investors, but that their ability to provide risk reduction during financial stress will be impaired as well. As this article from Bloomberg reports, Bridgewater is…
How Strong Is Your Stomach?
The vast majority of the time, most investors are not terribly concerned with their risk tolerance. Typically, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), a measure of S&P 500 volatility, sits comfortably below 20 and financial markets exhibit a consistent upward trend. However, as 2020 can attest, markets don’t always behave this way. Earlier this year the…
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Assessing Suitability in the Context of Uncertainty
BLOG SERIES: UNDERSTANDING RISK
This installment in our volatility series will aim to provide a framework that helps to quantify an investor’s ability and willingness to take risk based on constraints and the importance of reaching wealth targets. Additionally, I will finally add varying returns into the analysis to illustrate the impact of the risk and return trade-off. Through simple examples and simulations, I will show that understanding an investor’s total financial picture and applying a probabilistic framework for risk management can help achieve desired outcomes in the face of uncertainty.
How Much Can You Bear?
In last week’s edition of Sagacious, we explored the rationale for shifting away from a traditional balanced portfolio (60 percent equities, 40 percent fixed income) based on recent comments from Dr. Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at Wharton. However, just because a portfolio may be deemed efficient, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily right for all…
Vitamin D: Harvesting the Diversification Premium Through Prudent Leverage
BLOG SERIES: RISK PARITY
In our latest Insight piece, we explore the parallels between the poker table and the world of investing by studying the nuances of risk and uncertainty. Authors Scott Smith (Managing Partner) and Ben Reeves (Manager, Data Science & Engineering) demonstrate how utilizing a Risk Parity strategy can help investors embrace uncertainty and derive more stable investment outcomes.
What is Driving the Surge of Interest in Stocks?
Whether it’s from speaking to friends and family or browsing social media feeds, it’s easy to see that there is a renewed interest in the stock market among retail investors. At first glance, having more people interested in their personal finance and investing in financial markets seems like a very positive thing. However, after closer…
Some Things Never Change
As humanity emerges from the most recent crisis, we will read about how things have forever changed. People will write about the impact on how we work, commute, interact, and shop, as well as how the economy and markets will be affected. One thing that will remain constant, however, is human behaviour. Morgan Housel shares his…