Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "managed futures". Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "managed futures". Sort by date Show all posts

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Optimal Portfolios

I have been doing some experimentation with designing optimal portfolios, something which I last looked at in 2011. I have the monthy rates of return on various asset classes going back to 1996. These include international shares (MSCI World Index, gross) both hedged into Australian Dollars and not. Australian shares (ASX 200 accumulation), Managed Futures (a mix of Man AHL and Winton), direct real estate (a particular US fund as a proxy), hedge funds (HFRI index), the bond market (again I'm using a fund as a proxy), Australian Dollar cash, and gold in Australian dollars. You can use the solver in Excel to find the allocation that monthly rebalanced gives the highest Sharpe Ratio. This optimal portfolio varies over time but generally it doesn't like hedge funds and allocates about 10-20% to gold, and 20-40% to managed futures. Because future performance won't necessarily be the same as past performance (particularly a worry for managed futures) and because managed futures, in particular, are not tax effective – they pay most income out subject to marginal tax rates – I wouldn't allocate according to a particular optimization. A target portfolio gets near the optimal performance while being more diversified and a bit more tax effective:

This graph shows the performance of various assets and a "target portfolio":


Here the target portfolio is 25% international shares (half hedged into Australian dollar and half not), 25% Australian shares, 25% managed futures, and then 5% in each of real estate, bonds, cash, gold, and hedge funds. Then the whole thing is geared up a bit with borrowing. It performs pretty nicely over various historical periods.

Here we have a close up of performance since the financial crisis:

I've managed to match the performance of the Australian index but have lagged behind the MSCI World Index. It matches the performance of the MSCI but has a smoother path. The next graph shows ten year rolling returns:

Here we see that such a portfolio clearly dominates in the long-run over regular stock indices or my own performance, which has not been good over a ten year period recently. The graph also shows how the performance of the Australian stock market has declined. It had very high ten year  returns prior to the crisis, but now has lower returns than international shares over the last ten years.

I have been moving in the direction of the optimal portfolio by diversifying out of Australian shares and buying managed futures, but it has been too slow so far. In the last few months I have been buying $A10k of managed futures each month. I also allocated more to international investments when I reinvested my CFS superannuation fund in their wholesale funds.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Varying the Allocation to Managed Futures



The chart (the y-axis is logarithmic) shows the effect of varying the allocation to managed futures from 10% to 90% (with the remainder of the portfolio in the MSCI World Index) for the period of the last eleven years. To avoid any drawdown during the 1998 crisis (which looks so insignificant now) you needed an allocation of 40% to managed futures. To avoid drawdown in the 2000-02 bear market about 50%, while in the current crisis a 70% allocation has been necessary (which is close to the maximum Sharpe ratio portfolio). As I noted in yesterday's post, there are good reasons not to allocate so much to managed futures. Still these kind of results might make you rethink allocating so much to stocks or at least index funds.

Enoughwealth commented on yesterday's post asking what would the optimal allocation be from the point of view of July 2007 - i.e. before the current financial crisis started. Using data from October 1996 to July 2007 the Sharpe ratio is maximized for a portfolio that is 45% in stocks and 55% in managed futures. Borrowing 32 cents per dollar of equity results in the same volatility as stocks and a 1.5% average monthly return (Sharpe = 1.03) vs. 0.79% for stocks (Sharpe = 0.44). BTW the unleveraged portfolio with the maximum Sharpe ratio is the optimal portfolio in the Markowitz portfolio allocation model. One can then mix that portfolio with a cash allocation or leverage it up depending on your risk preferences.

P.S.

The optimal Sharpe-Markowitz allocation only takes into account the means, variances and covariances of the two return series. It doesn't take into account higher moment correlations, which are important for understanding the attraction of managed futures.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Hedge Funds vs. Managed Futures

In recent posts I have looked at the optimal allocation between stocks and managed futures and between stocks and a composite hedge fund index. The Sharpe Ratio maximizing choice of managed futures was between 55 and 75% of the portfolio depending on the sample of months used. When choosing between stocks and hedge funds though the Sharpe Ratio was maxmized when the whole portfolio was allocated to hedge funds. In fact it was even better to short stocks and go long hedge funds.

But what is the best choice between a generic hedge fund index and a managed futures fund? Using data on the Credit Suisse/Tremont Index and the Man-AHL Diversified Fund for October 1996 to October 2008 the Sharpe Ratio is maximized for an allocation of 30% to the managed futures fund and 70% to the Hedge Fund Index. This portfolio has only slightly higher volatility than the hedge fund index (2.31% vs. 2.14%) and a higher return (1.012% vs. 0.787% per month). By borrowing 72 cents for each dollar invested you could boost returns to the level of the managed futures fund - 1.54% per month with less volatility (3.97% vs. 5.16%) and a slightly lower volatility than stocks.

I've also run portfolio analyses including the MSCI, Man-AHL, Credit Suisse/Tremont, and the TIAA Real Estate Fund and CREF Bond Fund to represent two further asset classes. The maximum Sharpe Ratio was for a portfolio 100% in the real estate fund...

In the real world taking into account tax and other considerations, limitations on leverage (or safer forms of leverage), higher moment correlations, and likely higher future returns from stocks (than in this lost decade period) the best portfolio probably wouldn't be as extreme as these simple analyses indicate. But it would be very different from most people's portfolios and much more similar to the university endowment portfolios. I'll analyse some endowment type portfolios in my next post.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Optimal Allocation to Managed Futures

This post follows up from my recent posts about managed futures including this one on their diversification benefits. The Ibbotson-Pimco study suggested allocating a very large share of a portfolio to managed futures. I ran a simple experiment in a spreadsheet to find the optimal allocation between the MSCI World All Country Gross Index and the Man-AHL Diversified Fund. I use monthly returns from October 2002 to November 2008:



The correlation between these series is -.12 and as you can see the correlation seems to get more negative when more extreme returns are experienced as was discussed in the Altevo Research study. Not all correlations go to one in a financial crisis... The allocation which maximizes the Sharpe Ratio is 34% in stocks and 66% in managed futures. This is designated the composite portfolio:



The returns of this portfolio have a 0.33 correlation to the MSCI but a 0.90 correlation to the Man-AHL fund. Stocks returned 0.60% per month over the period with 4.56% standard deviation (Sharpe = 0.237). The Man fund returned 1.25% per month with a 5.05% standard deviation (Sharpe = 0.663). The composite portfolio returns 1.03% per month with a standard deviation of 3.50%. We can then lever this portfolio to increase returns. Borrowing 30 cents per dollar of equity results in the same volatility as the stock portfolio and a return of 1.27% per month on average (Sharpe = 0.751).

What are the downsides of a portfolio of this type? First, you would be assuming enormous manager risk - even though you could diversify across a small number of managers, all the best managers have developed their techniques from a common origin. Second, the strategies involve short-term trading and may not be as tax efficient as stock mutual funds. But this will depend on the fund structure, your jurisdiction, and whether you are holding the investment in a retirement account or not.

At the moment I only have 1.67% of assets (2.7% of net worth) allocated to managed futures. Moominmama has 2.2% in the Man-AHL Diversified Fund. My long-term target is to allocate 12.5% of assets to managed futures. But even this gives relatively little diversification benefit.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Which Type of Hedge Funds Give the Most Diversification Benefits?

I recently read a very interesting article about using hedge funds to diversify that was discussed by AllAboutAlpha. Adding hedge funds to a portfolio can both increase returns and reduce variability. Even if a hedge fund's returns were perfectly correlated with your existing portfolio's, if it had a positive alpha, allocating some money to the hedge fund might increase return and reduce drawdown relative to your existing portfolio. See my discussion of alpha-beta separation. But usually what is meant by diversification is adding assets whose returns are imperfectly correlated to the returns of the original portfolio. But you can go beyond that to also take into account "the higher moments" of the return distribution.

So what are "higher moments"?

The first moment of a distribution is the mean or in ordinary English the average. The second moment is the variance or its square root the standard deviation, which captures how tightly packed values of the variable are around the average. The "normal distribution" - the classic bell curve - can be entirely captured by these first two moments:



The mean is at zero and the numbers on the x-axis are standard deviations from the mean. The normal distribution always looks exactly like this, though the actual numerical value of a standard deviation could be larger or smaller and the mean might be different to zero.

The third moment of a distribution is skewness. A distribution is skewed if one side of the distribution is much more stretched out than the other:



A positively skewed distribution has a long-tail to the upside. The fourth moment is kurtosis which measures how sharply the distribution peaks and how fat the tails are:



The distribution marked in red is the most kurtotic. No longer is there a plateau of many values clustered around the mean, but values are dispersed towards the extremes.

An investment with negatively skewed and positively kurtotic returns is prone to "crashes". The MSCI world index has negative skewness and positive kurtosis.

The standard "beta" in the finance literature measures how much an investment's returns change when the returns on another investment change. Usually we are measuring how much a security's or an asset class' returns change in relation to the returns of the "market portfolio" or a stock index like the S&P 500. But we could also measure the relationship between the variances of two investments and the relations between the higher (3rd and 4th) moments of the distributions.

An investment with a low (less than one) or negative conventional beta to an existing portfolio will reduce the volatilty of that portfolio. A low variance beta means that when the volatility of the portfolio rises due to market conditions the additional investment will mitigate that increase in volatility by contributing less or even a negative amount to the increase in volatility. As is well known, the correlation between most investments seems to rise when market volatility rises. It would be really nice if we could find investments that reduced the tendency of our portfolio to experience extreme negative events. Investments with low and negative skewness and kurtosis betas will be best at achieving this.

Finally getting to the point :), the paper computes these higher order betas for a variety of hedge fund indices with respect to the MSCI index (the estimates are for monthly data from January 1994 to February 2006):



Any betas below one have diversification benefits. By far the best diversifier is managed futures. Fixed Income Arbitrage, Equity Market Neutral, and Convertible Arbitrage are also good diversifiers. The least good diversifier is long-short equity, which includes the likes of 130/30 strategies. Only managed futures and equity market neutral have normal returns, though Global Macro and Long-Short Equity also both have zero or positive skewness:



The author adds a mixture of the best diversifying hedge fund indices to a 60% equities and 40% bonds portfolio and finds increased returns and reduce variance for all mixes up to a 35% allocation to diversifiers. I have a feeling that if he tried pure managed futures the gains would be even better.

Given these results, and the high returns to some managed futures funds a large allocation to managed futures could be very advantageous (subject to tax considerations). For more on the advantages of commodities and managed futures see the Ibbotson-Pimco study.

BTW, another new category today: "Hedge Funds".

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Diversifying a China Oriented Portfolio

Glitzer asked me a little while ago to simulate a China oriented portfolio diversified with the Man-AHL managed futures fund. She specified two US listed stocks for the base portfolio - CHN - the China Fund and IFN - the India Fund with 80% allocated to CHN and 10% allocated to IFN and the remaining 10% in Man-AHL. If you invested a lump sum in these three securities at the beginning of October 1996 and rebalanced the portfolio monthly this is how they would have performed till now (ignoring transaction costs):



Everything has gone up very nicely. CHN gained 508%, IFN, 640%, and Man-AHL 724%. Glitzer's allocation would have gained 558%. But CHN and IFN have been very volatile with monthly standard deviations of 10.9% and 11.4%. Man-AHL's standard deviation is 5.2%, which is more than most developed country stock indices. Glitzer's portfolio would have had a monthly standard deviation of 9.4%. Can we improve on this?

Keeping the 8/1 ratio of CHN to IFN the allocation to Man-AHL that minimizes the portfolio standard deviation is 78% in Man-AHL (!), 19.6% in CHN, and 2.4% in IFN. This portfolio has a standard deviation of only 4.6% and ends up increasing by 805%. More than any of the funds due to the wonders of rebalancing!

Now Glitzer actually proposed dollar cost averaging - adding $1000 per month to the portfolio in the 80:10:10 proportions and not rebalancing. How would this have turned out since 1996?

We would have invested $153,000 and the current value of the portfolio would be $565,000. The current allocation would be: CHN, 80.1%, IFN, 11.4%. Man-AHL 8.5%. So there would have been a little drift from the original allocation. The total gain over the period would have been 490% and the monthly standard deviation is 9.1%. Dollar cost averaging a fixed allocation doesn't work here - it underperforms a lump sum investment with rebalancing. The optimal allocation to Man-AHL here is actually 83%. Investing a lump sum 80:10:10 in 1996 and not rebalancing would have resulted in a 463% gain with a 8.6% standard deviation. The current allocation would be 72:13:15.

The bottom line here is that based on historical performance very large allocations to managed futures are justifiable in order to improve volatility and return of equity oriented portfolios. Rebalancing helps a lot. Dollar cost averaging less so.

In the real world rebalancing costs money. But if you are investing regularly, adjusting your allocation to effect rebalancing might make sense. We don't know whether managed futures will perform as well in the future and I would not risk putting 80% of my portfolio in a single fund. I would use a smaller allocation to managed futures and distribute it across managers and use other asset types for additional diversification. And unless you live in Hong Kong like Glitzer or have your managed futures in a retirement account, you need to think about the tax implications of these funds.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Asset Class Performance Through the GFC



This post follows up with the performance in the last 4 month of the asset classes I discussed in the context of endowment style portfolios in December. The chart shows a bunch of funds and indices and a simulation of my current "target portfolio" - the thick brown line - through the end of March. That's not the portfolio I have, which is heavier in stocks and lighter on managed futures but the one I am aspiring to in the next few years. The simulation uses:

47% MSCI World
14% Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index
14% Man AHL Managed Futures
10% TIAA Real Estate
10% TIAA Bond Market
5% AUD Cash

Then a 50% hedge into the Australian Dollar is applied and the portfolio is invested in with 120% of equity (i.e. borrowing an extra 20 cents for each dollar). Returns are in USD terms. The portfolio certainly does not escape the financial crisis and by following the path of the AUD you can see that the hedge into Australian Dollars exacerbates the bad performance.

The portfolio did well in the previous bear market but except for a portfolio constructed of bonds and managed futures this bear market has been too sharp for anything to do well.

The target portfolio has a beta of 0.86 and an annual alpha of 5.66% relative to the MSCI World Index. Not considering tax consequences, you could have constructed a smoother and better performing portfolio from managed futures, hedge funds, and real estate. Or really just managed futures and hedge funds...

Next up, I'll look at the problem from the Australian investor's viewpoint (i.e. in AUD)

Sunday, January 11, 2009

SuperAlphaFund

Superfund is now offering a fund in Australia. This company, which originated in Austria, offers managed futures products to retail investors in many countries around the world.

The fund is invested 37.5% in managed futures, 37.5% in a market neutral stock trading program and 25% in Australian cash equivalents. They plan to hedge returns into the Australian Dollar. Minimum investment is $A10,000 which compares favorably to the Macquarie and Select Funds managed futures products. Fees are steeper than most hedge funds with a 3% management/administration fee and a 27% performance fee with no hurdle. The fund is not a FIF. It seems that they plan on paying all fund income out in order to avoid entity level taxation.

Comparing the Quadriga B managed futures fund that Superfund offers in the US to Man's AHL Diversified Fund we find that between November 2002 and November 2008, Quadriga returned 1.92% per month but had a monthly standard deviation of 11.4%. Man AHL returned 1.40% per month but with a much lower standard deviation of 4.9%. In other words, the Man fund is higher quality. Quadriga had a correlation of 0.06 to the MSCI World Index while Man had -0.10. The correlation between Quadriga and Man is high at 0.73. I don't have any data on their stock trading program.

Bottom line is I wouldn't recommend this fund at this stage except to someone who was very heavily into managed futures and wanted to diversify across managers to reduce risk.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Next Investment for my Mom

We had a structured note product - managed futures with a capital guarantee. It has now matured and it is time to reinvest some of the money. I'm planning to reinvest the amount we originally invested in this product and transfer the profit to our other broker to be added to our investment with Thomas White. Our manager at UBS sent information on some products we could re-invest in:

1. Man/AHL managed futures - This is a very similar product to the Man fund I have invested in myself. I did some analysis of the data supplied - it's returned 16.5% p.a. since September 2002 with a 4.9% monthly standard deviation. The MSCI returned 17.2% with a standard deviation of 3.1%. So it gives stock like returns but with more volatility. However, it has low correlations with other investments. 0.11 with the MSCI, 0.23 with CREF Bond Market, -0.03 with TIAA Real Estate, zero with the S&P 500. The only strong correlation I found (0.73) was with Superfund Quadriga B another managed futures product. Is there a managed futures beta (systematic risk factor) ? Yes, I like this product :)

2. UBS A&Q Alternative Solution Index Certificates - This provides access to UBS internal hedge funds. A&Q stands for "Alternative and Quantitative" - these are quant driven hedge funds. 75% of the money is in hedge funds, 10% in commodities, 5% in real estate, 5% in private equity, and 5% in cash. Between June 2006 (inception) and the end of February the Certificate returned an annualized 10.46% with a Sharpe ratio of 1.02, which beat the various benchmarks presented (The SPX did 4.91% including dividends). So this product seems to be of good quality.

3. UBS Multi-Strategy Proprietary Index Certificate - This also provides access to UBS internal hedge funds - but these are the O'Connor funds which are not quantitative funds. Both hedge fund products diversify across individual funds and strategies. From May 2004 to October 2004 it returned 6.09% with a Sharpe ratio of 0.68, which is not particularly attractive compared to equities in that period but better than bonds. Interestingly, at the end of October they terminated their U.S. long-short equity program due to underperformance. So maybe returns will improve going forwards?

4. UBS Agribusiness (USD) Strategy Certificate - 80% is invested in agricultural related stocks and 20% in commodities. I wonder if this is a sign of a bubble - selling this stuff to investment bank retail clients? Maybe a little bit in this one? There is no data as it is a new product.

Minimum investment in these products is typically $10k with $1k increments above that. You don't need huge amounts of money to invest in hedge funds, at least outside the U.S.

He suggests investing most in option 2 and less in each of the three others. We're looking at a $US200k investment. I'm going to suggest to weight the Man/AHL fund more highly than the O'Connor funds or the Agribusiness Certificate and give him the benefit of the doubt on the other two.

I'm also looking to replace a bond fund with an equity fund. The bond fund only returned about 3% per year since we bought it in 2003 and we have too many bonds. More on that in another post.

Wednesday, May 02, 2018

April 2018 Report

A very active month financially. The Australian stock market rebounded quite strongly and now looks pretty bullish to me. I also started trading futures again, which so far had the opposite effect on the results for the month :)

The Australian Dollar fell from USD 0.7680 to USD 0.7540. The MSCI World Index rose 1.08%, and the S&P 500 0.38%. The ASX 200 rose 3.92%. All these are total returns including dividends. We gained 2.86% in Australian Dollar terms and 0.98% in US Dollar terms. So, we underperformed the Australian market and to a small degree the international markets but outperformed the U.S. market.

The best performing investment in dollar terms was CFS Geared Share Fund up AUD17k. The worst performer in dollar terms was IPE, down AUD3k. My holding is now quite large (more than 1% of the value of the company - it's a very low value company) and the price is quite erratic. The best performing asset class was large cap Australian stocks, which gained 2.84%. The worst performing asset class was private equity, losing 2.04%, the only asset class to lose money this month.

A new item that I am reporting from this month is trading income. This includes trading in futures and options etc and interest on cash dedicated to trading. It doesn't include any trading done on fundamental grounds. This month I lost money - USD1,987 - which isn't surprising as I was experimenting with different models and approaches and learning to trade more confidently. I pretty much reversed that on the first day of this month, but anything could happen. Less than 3% of net worth is dedicated to trading at this point, which mainly means a deposit of Australian and US dollars used as margin for derivatives. The plan for this month is to consistently trade one futures contract according to the trades that the model provides, while learning about entering trades more optimally and setting stops or using options as hedges (much wider hedges than I was using last month).

We made a bit more progress towards the new long-run asset allocation:


Total leverage includes borrowing inside leveraged (geared) mutual (managed) funds. The allocation is according to total assets including the true exposure in leveraged mutual funds. I have reduced the allocation to cash, because assuming I will be trading, there will always be plenty of cash in the trading account plus the ability to borrow, though the latter can be reduced in a financial crisis. Commodities now includes managed futures, trading, and gold.

The "improvement" in allocation, came partly due to market movements and partly due to investment activity. We invest AUD 2000 monthly in a set of managed funds, and there are also retirement contributions. Then there are distributions from funds and dividends. During the month, I also:
  • Invested in a venture capital fund.
  • Bought more IPE (private equity) at below net asset value.
  • Sold out of Leucadia National (LUK) and bought more 3i (III.L, private equity) and China  Fund (CHN).
  • Bought more units in the Winton Global Alpha fund (managed futures - in the commodities category).
  • Transferred cash into my trading account and did a lot of trading of futures and options while developing my trading model.
As a result the allocation to private equity and commodities increased quite a bit.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Second Investment in Managed Futures

I have long seen the advantages of managed futures funds. The best of managed futures funds companies seems to be Winton. I previously made an investment with Man-AHL. The fund hasn't made much money for us, but did much better in the financial crisis than most of my other investments. We have 0.80% of net worth invested in the fund. We also have some investment in commodities via GTAA. Another fund that hasn't done much of anything so far. Now I have made an initial investment in a Winton fund offering. The investment is 4.6% of net worth. This takes exposure to commodities out of net worth to 6.0% and out of gross assets 4.5%. The main downside to this fund is that in Australia it doesn't have any tax advantages compared to stocks, which have strong advantages. This means that this will likely remain a small diversifying investment until maybe one day I set up a self-managed super fund, which is a tax advantaged structure itself.

How does this fit into our overall investment strategy? Basically we have a 60/40 portfolio with 60% in stocks and 40% in other investments. Within the stocks 2/3 are planned to be Australian stocks and 1/3 foreign. Within those categories we also allocate to large and small cap Australian and to US and non-US stocks in proportion to their market capitalizations. In the 40% other we have allocations to: bonds, real estate, hedge funds, commodities, private equity, cash, and other. The whole portfolio is then levered to provide about a beta of 1 to the stock market and rebalanced on an ongoing basis. The leverage of a diversified portfolio is an idea from the risk parity approach. 60/40 is simply the traditional stock-bond ratio used for diversified portfolios, and we weight heavily to Australian stocks for tax reasons. Several of the supposedly non-stock investments are in fact Australian listed stocks that are listed investment companies pursuing alternative investment strategies. A lot of the leverage is obtained by investing in leveraged (geared) managed stock funds rather than using margin loans ourselves. We keep the actual margin loan quite small most of the time. This is because the interest rate we can get is much worse than what the funds can get. Interactive Brokers has much better interest rates, but they aren't giving loans to Australian investors at the moment. All this seems to me a reasonable strategy for a non-high net worth investor based in Australia.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Managed Futures Funds

The Australian Financial Review recently (16-17 August edition) highlighted two lesser known managed futures funds offered in Australia that were developed by alumni of AHL which was acquired by Man Investments. The Select Futures Fund has a minimum investment of $A25k and has performed nicely:



though it then lost 8.6% in July. The Macquarie Winton Global Alpha Fund returned 27.2% in the year to June 30 compared to 16.9% for select futures. It lost 4.4% in July. The minimum investment though is $A50k. An advantage the fund has over the Man Funds is it is considered to be an Australian fund for taxation purposes and, therefore, not subject to the FIF regulations. Neither is the Select Futures Fund a FIF. The Man-AHL Diversified Fund has a minimum investment of $A20k while Man's various OM-IP offerings have $5,000 minima. The latter have very limited liquidity while the Winton fund allows daily redemptions and the others are in between in liquidity. Only the OM-IP and Global Alpha funds appear to be marginable through CommSec.

But, interestingly, there is a totally liquid alternative: The Macquarie Winton Global Opportunities Trust which is listed on the ASX. Is this a free lunch? That will be the topic of another post :)

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

September 2019 Report

In September the Australian Dollar fell from USD 0.6729 to USD 0.6752. The MSCI World Index rose 2.15% and the S&P 500 1.87%. The ASX 200 rose 2.08%. All these are total returns including dividends. We gained 0.52% in Australian Dollar terms and 0.87% in US Dollar terms. The target portfolio lost 0.28% in Australian Dollar terms and the HFRI hedge fund index lost 0.27% in US Dollar terms. So, though we under-performed all three stock indices we out-performed our target portfolio and the HFRI. Updating the monthly returns chart:


Here is a report on the performance of investments by asset class (futures includes managed futures and futures trading):
Private equity and hedge funds did very well while gold and futures did poorly. The largest positive contribution to the rate of return came from hedge funds greatest detractor was gold, which was the exact reverse of the previous month. The returns reported here are in currency neutral terms.

Things that worked well this month:
  • Hedge funds shined as Platinum Capital, Regal, and Cadence gained significantly but Tribeca lost more money.
  • Pengana Private Equity gained.
What really didn't work:
  • Gold and Winton Global Alpha lost significantly, partly reversing recent gains.
  • Tribeca lost as noted above.
Trading: We gained modestly in Bitcoin and US treasuries futures and lost moderately in Palladium and big time in gold. Using a narrower definition including only futures and CFDs we gained 0.48% on capital used in trading. Including ETFs we lost 1.53%. Using both definitions we are a bit ahead of where we were at this point last year. This graph shows cumulative trading gains year to date:


The picture is better using the broader definition.

We moved a further towards our new long-run asset allocation.* Cash increased most and private equity and bonds decreased most as we received the proceeds from the IPE.AX delisting:


On a regular basis, we also invest AUD 2k monthly in a set of managed funds, and there are also retirement contributions. Then there are distributions from funds, dividends, and interest. Other moves this month:
  • We sold $50k of Tenet Health Care bonds when they were called and $50k of Discovery Bonds matured. We bought $50k of HSBC bonds So, our direct bond holdings declined by $50k.
  • We traded with moderate success, as discussed above.
  • I bought a small number of Platinum Capital shares as their price was a lot below net asset value.
  • We started buying Australian Dollars again, buying AUD 20k this month.
  • We received the proceeds from the delisting of Oceania Capital.
  • As a result of all this our cash holdings increased by around AUD 120k.
* Total leverage includes borrowing inside leveraged (geared) mutual (managed) funds. The allocation is according to total assets including the true exposure in leveraged funds. We currently don't have any leveraged funds.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Performance of Endowment Style Portfolios



In the final post of this series I look at the performance of an endowment type portfolio over the last 12 years. 10% is invested in the CREF Bond Fund and the remaining 90% split equally between the MSCI World Index, the Man-AHL Diversified Fund, the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index, and the TIAA-Real Estate Fund. As is the case with all the portfolios I've posted here the portfolio is rebalanced monthly. This is the Balanced Portfolio. The Levered Portfolio borrows 45 cents for each dollar invested. In other words, the managed futures and stock portion of the portfolio are geared by 50% (one dollar borrowed for each dollar invested). The unlevered portfolio returns 0.83% per month (10.4% p.a.) with a monthly volatility of only 1.78%. The levered portfolio returns 1.08% per month (13.7% p.a.) with a monthly volatility of only 2.58%. This volatility is roughly half that of stocks or managed futures and the return is more than double what stocks returned in this period. Beta to the stock market is 0.35.

These results look better in the last couple of months than Ray Dalio's All Weather Portfolio, which is one of my inspirations. The reason is that while the AWP only includes "beta sources" the portfolio proposed in this post has 45% of assets allocated to "alpha sources" (i.e. they produce alpha relative to the MSCI benchmark).

Implementing a strategy like this in Australia is probably going to require a self managed superannuation fund (similar but much more bureaucratic than a US IRA) for someone like me with half or more of net worth in superannuation as I haven't found a regular superannuation provider with a managed futures option or for that matter a hedge funds option. Funds like PSS(AP) have some money invested in hedge funds of course, but you can't increase that proportion. You can decrease it by also investing in some of their single asset class funds.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Asset Class Update

Time for an update on recent asset class and target portfolio performance:



This chart is in USD terms with all investments as they would appear to a US investor without any currency hedging. Australian and international shares have seen the nicest rebound as might be expected. The Australian Dollar has also risen (this series includes interest as well as exchange rate movements) and hedge funds and bonds have performed positively albeit a lot weaker than stocks. Managed futures, real estate, and gold have seen a negative performance in this period. The levered portfolio consists of:

17% MSCI
30% Australian stocks
14% Hedge funds
14% Managed futures
10% US Real Estate
10% International Bonds
5% Cash

Then it is hedged so that 63% of the portfolio is exposed to the Australian Dollar and then 50% is borrowed against the equity to lever up the portfolio. That is our target portfolio. It has also bounced back nicely and is currently at the levels of late 2006.

This is what things look like for an Australia based investor. The hedge funds and managed futures are hedged into Australian Dollars but the other asset classes are unhedged. The target portfolio is the same levered portfolio exposed 63% to the Australian Dollar:



The impact of the GFC was offset by the fall in the Australian Dollar. The subsequent rise in the Australian Dollar has resulted in a loss in the foreign bonds, accentuated falls in foreign real estate and gold, and slowed the rise in foreign stocks. As a result the target portfolio that declined gradually into the GFC hasn't recovered much either yet. This is why I wanted to have only 50% exposure to the AUD but haven't managed to keep things that low.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Optimal Allocation to Hedge Funds



I've recently posted about the optimal portfolio choice between a global stock index and a managed futures fund. For this post I downloaded monthly return data from October 1996 to October 2008 for the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index, which is an aggregate of many different hedge fund strategies. You can't actually invest directly in either index. This is in contrast to the managed futures analysis where the fund returns were after all fees and so the results are pretty realistic if the stock exposure occurred through a low cost index fund.

The hedge fund index yields 2.5% a year more than the stock index. So you'd want a fund of funds to cost less than that. Typical fees are 1% + a 10% performance fee. But the monthly standard deviation of the hedge fund index is 2.14% vs. 4.22% for the stock index. So it is possible to get a slightly higher return for less than half the volatility by investing in hedge funds instead of stocks.

The correlation between the two indices is 0.61 in contrast to the negative correlation between the managed futures fund and the stock index. This relatively high correlation and the higher returns of the hedge funds means that the optimal allocation is to invest only in hedge funds. Actually the Sharpe Ratio maximizing portfolio shorts stocks! The optimal share of stocks is -20% with 120% in hedge funds. This is the composite portfolio in the chart above. Borrowing one dollar for every dollar of equity results in a volatility about the same as stocks but with a monthly return of 1.37% vs. 0.58% for stocks and 0.79% for unlevered hedge funds.

Restricting the analysis to the period up till July 2007 only reduces the short position to 10%.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Target Portfolio and Asset Class Performance: Australian Style

As promised this post looks at the performance of our target portfolio from the perspective of an Australian investor. As I did in a post in December I am representing foreign shares by the MSCI World Index converted into AUD and Australian shares by EWA converted into AUD. The other asset classes are as in the U.S. post but again converted to AUD. However, the managed futures fund and hedge fund index have the exchange rate risk hedged out as is standard for products of this type offered in Australia, but the foreign stocks, bonds, and real estate are not hedged. The target portfolio is modeled as:

EWA: 30%
MSCI: 17%
CREF Bond Fund: 10%
TIAA Real Estate Fund: 10%
Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index (hedged into AUD): 14%
Man AHL Managed Futures (hedged into AUD): 14%
AUD Cash: 5%

Again 20 cents is borrowed (in AUD) for each dollar invested.



The target portfolio performs pretty nicely - it doesn't manage to avoid losses in either bear market but it doesn't suffer a sharp drop in the current bear market, outperforming Australian shares since the market peak. The target portfolio has a mean monthly return of 0.78% and a Sharpe ratio of 0.69 vs. 0.65% and 0.28 for Australian shares. Again, a mix of hedge funds and managed futures would have done even better (ignoring tax implications).

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Macquarie Winton Global Opportunities Trust

I promised a follow-up to my post on Australian managed futures funds. Obviously, I'm not currently in the market for any new investments in Australia, but one day I will be. And one area where I want to increase exposure is in managed futures funds.

The Macquarie Winton Global Opportunities Trust is a managed futures fund listed on the Australian stock exchanges. The advantages of this is that there is no minimum investment required and you can redeem your investment at any time. The downside is that there is usually a large spread between buy and sell prices and the stock is not marginable with CommSec. It does trade at a discount to net asset value though. Also the stock is in fact a seven year capital protected product similar to the Man OM-IP funds. At the end of this period you can receive units in an unlisted fund. For the 2007-8 year earnings per share were 31.8 cents but only 5.8 cents were paid out as a distribution. It seems the distributions are interest on the funds cash, while net capital gains will be paid out at maturity. This allows investors to take advantage of the long-run CGT rate. By contrast, the unlisted Macquarie Winton Global Alpha Fund pays out all earnings, is not capital protected and as a result has somewhat lower fees. Returns are comparable to the other Winton funds:



The fund has been about flat since the end of July. The Winton funds appear to be beating benchmarks.

Independent research on the fund was lukewarm - with "approved" or "recommended" assessments rather than higher ratings. One analyst was worried about the capital protection structure and costs, while the other regarded the underlying fund as too much of blackbox. I think neither critique is now particularly relevant after three years of fund existence. In conclusion the fund has some pros and cons relative to the other products available. You'd have to assess how important each of those is to you when deciding which to invest in.

You can get lots more info on the fund from Macquarie's website.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Man OM-IP 3 Eclipse



This is a hedge fund investment I am considering. The kind of thing that is not available to individual investors in the US but is available here in Australia. UK-based Man Group is probably the largest managed futures manager. This product is a structured investment that consists of four elements:

1. An 80%+ investment exposure in AHL, Man's main managed futures program. This is a system trading one hundred plus global futures markets. In the last 10 years it has returned 16.1% per annum (5 years, 12.3%, 1 year, 20.6% as at October 2007 - the MSCI returned: 8.8%, 20.2%, and 24.8% respectively - Moom: 10.8%, 26.1%, and 34.6%). So it outperforms stocks in bear markets and underperforms in bull markets. Examination of periods of drawdown in the Australian stock market, show that the program always made money in those periods.

2. A 20%+ investment exposure to the RMF Commodity Strategies program. This program invests with 30 hedge fund managers investing in commodities via futures and stocks. In the last three years it returned 18.4% p.a. (MSCI: 20.7%, Moom: 20.6%) and in the last year 13.2% as at October 2007.

3. A 20%+ investment exposure (yes there is moderate leverage in the scheme) to the RMF Asian Opportunities fund of managers. This program invests with 14 hedge fund managers specializing in Asian investments. In the last three years it returned 16.4% p.a. and in the last year 24.3% as at October 2007.

Though all three of these programs have quite high month to month volatility, their maximum drawdowns are lower than the stock market - they have a smoother equity curve in the long-run, year to year. Of course, this being a hedge fund, the fees are sky-high: 2% and 20% for AHL and 1.5% and 10% for RMF, plus brokerage of 3% per year plus an initial load of 5% (CommSec will rebate 80% of the 4% sales commission they will receive), plus another 0.5% overall to Man, plus 0.25% to Commonwealth Bank p.a and some other small fees. But all the returns quoted above are after fees (not the 5% load presumably).

4. A capital guarantee provided by Commonwealth Bank of Australia. When the investment matures in eight years they promise to pay back at least $A1.00 per initial $A1.00 investment. The most you can lose, therefore, is the interest on your money (assuming positive real interest rates) - which is quite a bit over eight years of course. They will also lock in each year half of any new net profits into the guarantee. So say the fund makes 10% in the first year. Then the guarantee will rise to $A1.05 per share and so forth.

Advantages Opportunity to invest in a high alpha (relative to the stock market) diversifying investment of a type that retail investors usually have limited access to. The managers are high quality.

Disadvantages The investment is relatively illiquid. Prices are quoted once a month and shares can be redeemed monthly. Until 2011 there is a 2% fee for exiting the fund. The capital guarantee only applies for shares redeemed in 2016 at maturity. Taxation is not so favorable either - according to the prospectus the long-term capital gains tax rate will apply to the capital guarantee but all gains above that will be taxed as an unfranked dividend - i.e. at ordinary income tax rates. There is also the potential for Australia's draconian foreign investment funds (FIF) legislation to apply. These rules require you to pay tax on unrealized gains in foreign investment funds annually - there are lots of exceptions but this isn't one of them. But if you have less than $A50,000 invested in such funds you are also exempt. So I think, from my reading of the rules, I should be exempt.

What do you think? Would you invest in this?

P.S.

How would this investment be funded? It can be funded using a Commonwealth Securities margin loan with a 70% lending ratio. After all my recent purchases I only have $5515 in cash available on my margin loan. But I could easily invest $10,000 in this fund and still have a buffer before I'd get a margin call as the 70% loan ratio means the cash available will only be reduced to $2515. Though that is beginning to cut things close. But, on 13th March I should receive $A16,400 from Primary Health Care for my Symbion shares. So there isn't going to be any problem in funding either $10k or $20k for this investment. Longer term I want to reduce the size of my margin loan as margin interest is expensive compared to other sources of leverage. We'll have to wait for some of my recent trades to payoff first though.

Sunday, December 29, 2019

New Target Portfolio Allocation

Following up on my post on the best portfolios for Australia, this post will lay out the new target portfolio allocation. The basic idea is to reduce the allocation to managed futures from 25% in my previous target portfolio to 10%. This is because I plan to do little active trading going forward and futures funds have had lacklustre performance for several years. Maybe they will come back, but we should see them more as a potential hedge than as a main asset class at this point I think.

At the top level the portfolio is 60% in stocks and 40% in other assets. The other assets are allocated equally between bonds, futures, gold, and real estate. The stocks allocation is roughly equally divided between Australian and international stocks. 10% of the portfolio is allocated to private equity and 50% to public. Then the public allocation is divided between long only and hedge fund strategies. Within the long only Australian allocation, 1/3 is devoted to small cap stocks. The full allocation is:

10% Australian large cap
5% Australian small cap
12.5% International stocks
10.75% Australian oriented hedge funds
10.75% International oriented hedge funds
10% Private equity
10% Bonds
10% Real estate
10% Gold
10% Managed futures
1% Cash

We will also usually use some leverage or gearing. 1% in cash seems sufficient given the ability to borrow.