Tag Archives: risk control
Defense and Volatility
As the equity market has waned and waxed in 2022, investor interest has naturally turned toward ways of mitigating portfolio losses. Some factor indices can serve this goal, but investors searching for a defensive strategy need to define their search carefully. It’s natural to think that defensive strategies will be less volatile than the market…
Defense in the Balance
Balanced portfolios traditionally (and definitionally) hold a mix of stocks and bonds. Stocks have been the better-performing asset over time, but with a level of volatility that many investors find unacceptably high. Although bonds are usually included in a balanced portfolio more as a volatility dampener than a return enhancer, during the bull market in…
Time Sensitivity and Volatility Management
We all know that in the long run, the U.S. stock market has performed very well, compounding at well over 10% per year for nearly a century. We also know that sometimes the market performs very poorly, as the S&P 500®’s 20% decline in the first half of 2022 reminds us. For an investor who…
A Risk Control Approach to Cryptocurrencies: A Tool for a Crypto Winter
Earlier this year, we reported on the volatility of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies overall. In February 2022, the market was slightly down from its all-time high in November 2021. S&P Dow Jones Indices had just launched the new S&P Bitcoin and Ethereum Dynamically Rebalancing Risk Control 40% Indices (CET Close), and we saw that risk-adjusted performance…
- Categories Thematics
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Volatility, Cryptocurrency, and a Risk Control Approach
We’ve all heard it often—that volatility is a “feature” of Bitcoin and, by extension, the cryptocurrency market in general. While not all of us would agree with calling it a feature, most would agree that there is a significant amount of volatility in the cryptocurrency market. And, depending on your role—trader, asset manager, advisor, observer—you…
- Categories Thematics
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Manage Drawdown and Recovery with Dynamic Allocation
In October 2019, S&P Dow Jones Indices launched the S&P ESG Global Macro Index, an ESG-themed, regionally diversified, volatility-managed, multi-asset index. As discussed in my previous blog, the index has generated stable absolute returns of 5.44% annually, a volatility of 4.89%, and downside protection during extreme market scenarios, based on back-tested performance from Aug. 31,…
While Fixed Income Yields Remain Low, Theta Gang Generates Income through Covered Calls
In response to the economic ravages of COVID-19, central banks and investors around the world went on a bond buying spree, pushing fixed income yields down and complicating the search for portfolio-generated income. While yields are generally off their March 2020 extremes, by historical standards they remain quite diminished. One alternative strategy to generate supplemental…
- Categories Fixed Income, Strategy
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Gold and U.S. Treasuries Helped the S&P MARC 5% Index Performance YTD
Despite substantial market volatility and significant drawdowns in the first quarter of 2020, the S&P MARC 5% Index ended the quarter in positive territory (see The Importance of Asset Class Diversification: A Performance Analysis of the S&P MARC 5% Index). With markets staging impressive rebounds, we take a renewed look at the performance of the…
- Categories Commodities, Equities, Fixed Income, Strategy
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Putting Defensive Indices to the Test
In January 2019, we highlighted several indices designed to reduce the impact of large equity market drawdowns. Here we analyze the same suite of indices divided across three broad categories: defensive equity, multi-asset, and volatility. This analysis simply reviews performance since the S&P 500®’s high on Feb. 19, 2020, through the close on Friday, March…
- Categories Factors, Strategy
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COVID-19, defensive equities, Dividend Aristocrats, factors, liquid alternatives, liquid alts, low volatility, managed risk, multi-asset, quality, RC2, risk management, risk parity, S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, S&P 500 Low Volatility, S&P 500 Quality, S&P Systematic Global Macro, smart beta, strategy, VEQTOR
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- COVID-19, defensive equities, Dividend Aristocrats, factors, liquid alternatives, liquid alts, low volatility, managed risk, multi-asset, quality, RC2, risk management, risk parity, S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, S&P 500 Low Volatility, S&P 500 Quality, S&P Systematic Global Macro, smart beta, strategy, VEQTOR
Multi-Asset Income Strategies in a Low Interest Rate Environment
One of the most significant characteristics of the post-financial crisis world has been the global persistence of low, or even negative, interest rates. The entire U.S. Treasury curve yielded below 1% for the first time in history on March 9, 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the long end reverted recently on…
- Categories Strategy
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