Berlinda Liu is Director, Global Research & Design, at S&P Dow Jones Indices. In this role, she is responsible for quantitative research & design covering volatility, commodity, and other derivative-based indices and strategies.
Berlinda joined Standard & Poor's in December 2007. Prior to S&P, she was an equity derivatives strategist at both Bear Stearns, London, and Credit Suisse, New York, where she joined as a business analyst.
Berlinda is a CFA charter holder. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international business management from Wuhan University of China, a master’s degree in information system management from Carnegie Mellon University, in addition to her master’s in computational finance from Carnegie Mellon.Indices based on factors such as low volatility and quality generally have defensive characteristics. These strategies tend to outperform the broad benchmark in down markets, as previous studies have shown. Yet some market participants also believe that active management fares somewhat better than the benchmark in periods of volatility and distress. In 2018, the S&P Read more […]
Contrary to the myth that active managers tend to fare better than their benchmarks during volatile markets, 68.83% of domestic equity funds lagged the S&P Composite 1500® during the one-year period ending Dec. 31, 2018, making 2018 the fourth-worst year for active U.S. equity managers since 2001 (see Exhibit 1). Evidence from the SPIVA U.S. Read more […]
The impact of fees on investment returns is a widely studied and much debated topic. Over the past decade, as index-linked, lower-cost passive investing has taken hold, fees have become a greater focus. In recent years, there have been several studies published examining the impact of fees on performance. The U.K’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Read more […]
The latest results from the SPIVA U.S. Mid-Year 2018 Scorecard show improvement in the relative performance of actively managed domestic equity funds against their respective benchmarks. During the one-year period ending June 30, 2018, the overall percentage of all domestic funds outperforming the S&P Composite 1500® increased to 42.02%, compared with six months prior (36.57%). Read more […]
Our most recent Persistence Scorecard shows that relatively few funds can consistently stay at the top. Out of the 557 domestic equity funds that were in the top quartile as of March 2016, only 2.33% managed to stay in the top quartile at the end of March 2018. That means out of the 2,228 domestic Read more […]
In earlier posts, we analyzed the historical performance, risk contribution versus capital allocation, and return attribution and leverage of the S&P Risk Parity Indices. The results demonstrate that this indices in this series could potentially serve as benchmarks to measure the performance of active risk parity strategies. In this post, we will dig deeper into Read more […]
My earlier blog showed that equal risk allocation is different from equal capital allocation. The S&P Risk Parity Indices had roughly equal risk contribution from all three asset classes, while about 60% of the capital was allocated to fixed income. The historical performance of each asset class also showed that equal risk allocation did not Read more […]
In a prior blog, we showed that the S&P Risk Parity Indices tracked the average performance of active risk parity funds closer than a traditional 60/40 equity/bond portfolio. In this second part of the blog series, we will examine the risk contribution and capital allocation of these indices. The principles behind risk parity strategies relate Read more […]
Since the launch of the first risk parity fund—Bridgewater’s All Weather fund—in 1996, many investment firms have begun offering risk parity funds to their clients. Risk parity funds became especially popular in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, when many investors witnessed the failure by traditional U.S. dollar-based asset allocation to provide downside Read more […]
For decades, sophisticated institutional investors have been using combinations of options to achieve desired investment outcomes or specific payoff structures. With innovations in indexing, it is now possible to gain passive exposure to those predefined outcome goals. Before we begin to explore how those index strategies are constructed and how such access may be possible, Read more […]