First Fed Hike & Stock Market

Guest post by Contributing Editor, David R. Kotok, Cumberland Advisors.

There has been a lot of discussion about the Federal Reserve (Fed) and when it will move its interest rate to something higher than the present 0 to 0.25%. The Fed has been at the zero bound for years. My friend Jeff Saut at Raymond James noted that there are people who have been in this business over eight years and have never experienced a Fed rate hiking cycle. We have to look back more than a decade to recall what sequential hikes were like.

The questions are, when they will do it, by how much, in what sequence, for how long, to what level, and with what effect on the markets?

Bond market pundits think the Fed may raise rates quickly, as they did in other hiking cycles. Others, like our team at Cumberland Advisors, think they will take gradual steps in view of the fact that the US dollar is the strongest currency in the world. It is getting stronger, and worldwide interest rates are low and going lower. Approximately $4 trillion in total sovereign debt worldwide is now trading at negative interest rates. Additionally, the Fed does not see an inflation threat. It does see gradual recovery in the US and healing labor data.  Today’s employment report will add to the list of monthly improvements.  But the labor markets still have a long way to go to get to normal.  The Fed remembers the 1937 experience when they hiked interest rates too soon and dumped a recovering economy back into recession.

All that said, there is one question that remains. What happens to the stock market when the Fed raises interest rates?

Talley Léger is the co-author of our new book, the second (and revised) edition of From Bear to Bull with ETFs. He has published a study entitled “Don’t be too spooked by Fed rate hikes,” dated January 31, 2015. Talley has given us permission to share this Macro Vision Research piece with our readers. The link to his commentary is here.

We do not know what will happen in this particular cycle, since we are now in uncharted waters. We are coming out of the zero-interest-rate regime. We do know that the market has spent a lot of time and energy fretting about the prospect and the timing of rising rates. Our internal view at Cumberland Advisors is that the first rate hike will not trigger a market selloff. Further, we do not expect the bond market to sell off and interest rates to go shooting up when the Fed raises the interest rate from zero by an eighth or a quarter percent. And we expect the first rate hike to take place in the very latter part of this year or in early 2016.  In a few hours we shall see the newest labor data for the US.  We expect that it will validate this gradualist approach in our Fed forecast.

 

Disclosure:

The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Cumberland Advisors is not affiliated with FOLIOfn or The Portfolioist.

Related Links:

• Investing: What the heck is a Larry Portfolio
• Goodhart’s Law
• Oil, Markets, Volatility

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Investing: What the heck is a Larry Portfolio?

Guest post by Contributing Editor, Matthew Amster-Burton, Mint.com.

Recently, I wrote a three-part series on how to start investing.

Today, I want to look at an advanced topic. Generally, I avoid advanced topics in investing, for two reasons:

1. Most people don’t even have a grasp of beginner-level investing yet.
2. The vast majority of “advanced” investing techniques can’t beat a simple, diversified portfolio over time.

Today, I want to look at a possible exception. It’s called the Larry Portfolio, developed by a guy named (you guessed it) Larry Swedroe and presented in his short and readable new book, Reducing the Risk of Black Swans, cowritten with Kevin Grogan.

Like momentum investing, which I explored last week, the Larry Portfolio is a way to attempt to capture more return from your portfolio without taking more risk—the holy grail of investing. Spoiler alert: it’s a promising idea that may or may not be appropriate—or possible—to implement in your own investments.

This is fairly technical stuff, although I’ll leave the math out of it. If you’re interested in investing as a hobby, read on. If you just want a simple portfolio that will beat your stock-picking friends, that’s fine. Go back to my original series.

One kind of risk

Smart investors like to take smart risks.

Investing in just one company is a dumb risk. That company might go bankrupt in any number of unexpected ways. Investing in lots of companies (aka diversification) is a smart risk: you’re no longer exposed to the risk of one company flaming out.

You’re still exposed to the risk of the market as a whole, and that’s the risk that investors can expect to get paid for over time.

Investors call this total-market risk beta. Beta measures the volatility of the stock market as a whole. Generally speaking, to get more return, you have to take more risk: Treasury bonds have low beta and low expected returns; stocks have high beta and higher expected returns. A total stock market portfolio has a beta of 1. (Let’s talk about low-beta stocks another time, please!)

So you might imagine that the best possible portfolio would look something like this:

• Low-risk bonds (Government bonds from stable governments, high-quality corporate bonds, CDs)
• A total world stock market fund

Mix them in whatever proportion suits your risk tolerance. One popular formula is 60/40: 60% stocks, 40% bonds.

Many kinds of risk

Then, in the early 1990s, two professors at the University of Chicago, Kenneth French and Eugene Fama, took another look at the data. They found that beta couldn’t explain all of a portfolio’s returns.

Two other factors seemed to be important, too. A portfolio taking these factors into account could, some of the time, beat a total-market portfolio without being riskier. These factors are:

Size. Small company stocks tend to have higher returns than large company stocks.

Value. “Value” stocks, essentially stocks with low prices, tend to have higher returns than growth stocks. How do you decide which stocks are value stocks? Use a measure like price-to-earnings ratio.

Value stocks are essentially stocks in mediocre, boring companies. This seems like an odd way to make money, but it’s a highly persistent effect. (Value is believed to be a stronger effect than size.)

You can now easily buy mutual funds concentrating on small or value stocks, and many investors choose to “tilt” their portfolios toward these factors, hoping for bigger returns without bigger volatility.

It’s a reasonable hope, because beta, size, and value have low historical correlation. When you have multiple stocks in your portfolio that are exposed to different risks, we call that diversification. The same can be said for having multiple factors in your portfolio.

The Larry Portfolio

Now, what if the stock portion of the portfolio was made up of entirely small value stocks?

That would give plenty of exposure to beta (because small value stocks are still stocks, and correlate with the wider stock market), and also maximum exposure to the small and value premiums. It’s also reasonably well-diversified, because there are thousands of stocks that fit the profile.

This sounds like a risky stock portfolio, and it is: high risk, high expected return.

Larry Swedroe’s insight was: what if we mix a little of this very risky (but intelligently risky) stock portfolio with a lot of very safe bonds? Say, 30% small value stocks and 70% bonds?

The result is the Larry Portfolio, a portfolio with similar expected return to to 60/40 portfolio I described, but lower risk, because the portfolio is mostly bonds—the kind of bonds that did just fine during the Great Depression and the recent financial crisis.

Swedroe warns in the book that there are no guarantees in investing. “[A]ll crystal balls are cloudy—there are no guarantees,” he writes. The research behind the Larry Portfolio may be sound, but “we cannot guarantee that it will produce the same returns as a more market-like portfolio with a higher equity allocation.”

Is it for you?

I took a look at my portfolio. It looks almost exactly like the portfolio Swedroe describes in the first part of the book, a diversified 60/40 portfolio with plenty of exposure to beta but no exposure to the size or value premiums.

So I asked him the obvious question: should I have a Larry Portfolio?

“There is no one right portfolio,” Swedroe told me via email. “The biggest risk of the LP strategy is the risk called Tracking Error Regret.”

Tracking Error Regret is a nasty thing. Here’s what it means.

Inevitably, the Larry Portfolio will sometimes underperform a 60/40 portfolio. If the stock market is soaring, it might underperform it for years at a time. A Larry Portfolio holder might look around and say, “Dang, everyone is making a ton of money but me. This portfolio sucks.”

Then you jump off the Larry train and back into a 60/40 portfolio—probably right before a market crash that decimates your stock portfolio. (That’s the Black Swan in the book title.) “Oh no—Larry was right!” you conclude, and buy back in, but it’s too late: now you’re selling cheap stocks to buy expensive bonds.

There really isn’t any cure for Tracking Error Regret. You can write an investment policy statement (IPS) to remind yourself that you’re a long-term investor and shouldn’t be watching the market too closely, because it’ll only raise your blood pressure.

The worst way to address the problem is to assume that you’re too smart or tough to experience it.

Can we build it? Maybe we can

Finally, there’s one other reason the Larry Portfolio might not be for you: it requires using mutual funds that might not be available in your retirement plan.

If most of your money is in a 401(k) plan, and that plan doesn’t have a US small value fund and an international small value fund, you can’t really build a Larry Portfolio. You might be able to build a watered-down version, but it won’t have the same risk-return characteristics as the real thing.

I haven’t decided yet whether the Larry Portfolio is for me. If you’ve read this far, however, you’ll probably enjoy Swedroe’s book. And if you already use a Larry Portfolio or are considering one, please let me know in the comments.

Disclosure:

The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Mint.com is not affiliated with Folio Investing or The Portfolioist.

Related Links:

• Goodhart’s Law
• Oil, Markets, Volatility
• Saving Through the Ages

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC.

Goodhart’s Law

Guest post by Leo Chen, Guest Contributor to Cumberland Advisors.

Goodhart’s Law

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

-Charles Goodhart

When it was first introduced in 1975, Goodhart’s Law focused mainly on social and economic measures. Since then, many financial market indicators have lost their forecasting power and succumbed to Goodhart’s Law. Nevertheless, Goodhart’s Law in no way depreciates the value and importance of market indicators; it simply means that investors are unlikely to be able to consistently generate abnormal returns over time using popular measures that are publicly available to the entire market. A clear example is what has happened to the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX.

The Volatility Index

The Volatility Index (VIX) was a groundbreaking product when the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) released it in 1993. Also referred to as the fear index, VIX measures the expected underlying volatility in the S&P 500 over the next 30-day period on a real-time basis. Using various measures of VIX such as the two-week mean, the 30-day rolling standard deviation, etc., VIX traders and portfolio managers developed strategies that were initially profitable. However, over time it has become extremely difficult to profitably forecast the market by simply observing the movement in VIX.

While the history of the VIX demonstrates how a market gauge lost its predictive power once it caught investors’ attention, the CBOE Low Volatility Index, LOVOL, provides an even better illustration of how an indicator can lose its forward-looking power very quickly. CBOE began calculating the Low Volatility Index on March 21, 2006, and started disseminating LOVOL data on November 30, 2012. The forecasting ability of LOVOL immediately plunged to almost zero within a month. In fact, Goodhart’s Law has captured nearly all of the CBOE volatility indexes as prisoners. These fallen angels are no longer useful tools for forecasting purposes.

Another prominent index, developed in the late 1960s, that uses extremes in its value to signal that a market may soon change direction is the Arms Index (TRIN). As predicted by Goodhart’s Law, while technical indicators such as TRIN were able to successfully predict market returns in the past, their loss of forecasting power was only a matter of time when every technician used these ratios for trading purposes. Even the Federal Reserve was no exception. The pre-FOMC announcement drift was found to explain the equity premium puzzle in 2011. But this 24-hour window disappeared soon after the research was published.

Investors Beware

On one hand, Goodhart’s Law teaches us that a smart investor should not rely on any single factor known by the general public to be “powerful”; on the other hand, it does not negate the significance of any indicator.

The following figure is a ratio brought up by Chairman and Chief Investment Officer David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors. The CBOE SKEW Index measures S&P 500 tail risk, while the VXTH Index hedges “black swan” events such as Black Monday in 1987. Lagging and scaling both indexes by the lagged VIX, we are able to track the daily SPX with a correlation that can top 90%, comparable to the correlation between the S&P 500 and GDP. Nonetheless, a high correlation is not necessarily equivalent to strong forecasting power. While one could use this chart for long-term investing strategy, the accuracy of using these daily ratios to predict the daily market movement is approximately 51%, not economically significant enough for forecasting purpose.

Figure 1. Correlations between SPX and Volatility Indexes

Conclusion

The list of captives of Goodhart’s Law is clearly longer than just the indicators mentioned above. High-quality research should be able to produce positive abnormal returns as long as there is information that can be exploited; however, superior research alone is no longer synonymous with outperformance – time is also of the essence. Because of technological innovation in financial markets, the time frame in which Goodhart’s law operates today is much shorter than it was in earlier decades. Just as Moore’s Law predicts that chip performance will double every 18 months, investing methodologies must continually evolve in order to remain profitable, due to Goodhart’s Law.

Disclosure:

The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Cumberland Advisors is not affiliated with Folio Investing or The Portfolioist.

Related Links:

• Oil, Markets, Volatility
• Saving Through the Ages
• Is the Fed Really “Stealing from Savers”?

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC.

Oil, Markets, Volatility

Guest post by Contributing Editor, David R. Kotok, Cumberland Advisors.

Sharply lower oil prices have occasioned a huge discussion about their impact. We see it play out daily in newspapers, on TV and radio, at websites, on blogs, and in market letters. The range of forecasts runs from one extreme to another.

On one side, pundits predict a recession resulting from a US energy sector meltdown that leads to credit defaults in energy-related high-yield debt. They predict trouble in those states which have had high growth from the US energy renaissance. These bearish views also note the failures of Russian businesses to pay foreign-denominated debt held by European banks. And they point to sovereign debt risks like Venezuela.  These experts then envision the geopolitical risk to extend to cross-border wars and other ugly outcomes.

Geopolitical high-oil-price risk has morphed to geopolitical low-oil-price risk. That’s the negative extreme case.

The positive forecasts regarding oil are also abundant. American’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) drops robustly due to energy-price ripple effects of $50 oil. We are still in the early stages of seeing these results in US inflation indicators. There is a lot more to come as the lower energy price impacts a broad array of products and service-sector costs.

A big change in the US trade balance reflects the reduced imported oil price. We are also seeing that appear in the current account deficit plunge. In fact, both of those formerly strongly negative indicators are reaching new lows. They are the smallest deficits we have seen in 15 years. Action Economics expects that the current account deficit in the first quarter of 2015 will be below $80 billion. That is an incredible number when we think about gross flows history.

Remember that the current account deficit is an accounting identity with the capital account surplus.  Net $80 billion goes out of the US and turns around and comes back.  These are very small numbers in an economy of $18 trillion in size.

Think about what it means to have a capital account surplus of $80 billion, driven by a current account deficit of $80 billion. That means that the neutral balancing flows into the United States because of transactional and investment activity are now small. Therefore the momentum of US financial markets is driven by the foreign choices that are directing additional money flows into the US.

In the end the equations must balance. When there is an imbalance, it affects asset prices. In the present case, those asset prices are denominated in US dollars. They are desired by the rest of the world.  They are real estate, bonds, stocks, or any other asset that is priced in dollars and that the world wants to accumulate. In the US, where the size of our economy is approaching $18 trillion, the once-feared current account deficit has become a rounding error.

How bad can the energy-price hit be to the United States? There are all kinds of estimates. Capital Economics says that the decline in the oil price (they used a $40 price change, from $110 to $70 per barrel) will “reduce overall spending on petroleum-related liquids by non-oil-producing businesses and households by a total of $280 billion per year (from $770 billion to $490 billion).” Note that the present oil price is $20 a barrel lower than their estimated run rate.

That is a massive change and very stimulative to the US non-energy sector. The amount involved is more than double the 2% payroll-tax-cut amount of recent years. In fact it adds up to about 3/4 of the revised US federal budget deficit estimate in the fiscal year ending in 2015.

Let me repeat. That estimate from Capital Economics is based on an average price of $70 a barrel in the US for all of 2015. The current price of oil is lower. Some forecasts estimate that the oil price is going much lower. We doubt that but the level of the oil price is no longer the key issue.  It is the duration of the lower price level that matters.  We do not know how long the price will fall, but there is some thought developing that it will hover around $55 to $60 for a while (average for 2015).

There is certainly a negative impact to the oil sector. Capital spending slows when the oil price falls. We already see that process unfolding. It is apparent in the anecdotes as a drilling rig gets canceled or postponed, a project gets delayed, or something else goes on hold.

How big is the negative number? Capital Economics says, “The impact on the wider economy will be modest. Investment in mining structures is $146 billion, with investment in mining equipment an additional $26 billion. Altogether investment in mining accounts for 7.7% of total business investment, but only 1% of GDP.”

At Cumberland we agree. The projections are obvious: energy capital expenditures will decline; the US renaissance in oil will slow, and development and exploration will be curtailed. But the scale of the negative is far outweighed by the scale of the positive.

Let’s go farther. Fundstrat Global Advisors, a global advisory source with good data, suggests that lower oil will add about $350 billion in developing-nation purchasing power. That estimate was based on a 28% oil price decline starting with a $110 base. The final number is unknown. But today’s numbers reveal declines of almost 50%.  Think about a $350 billion to $500 billion boost to the developing countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. Note these are not emerging-market estimates but developing-country estimates.

It seems to us that another focal point is what is happening to the oil-producing countries. In this case Wells Fargo Securities has developed some fiscal breakeven oil prices for countries that are prominent oil producers. Essentially, Kuwait is the only one with a positive fiscal breakeven if the oil price is under $60 per barrel. Let’s take a look at Wells Fargo’s list. The most damaged country in fiscal breakeven is Iran. They need a price well over $100 in order to get to some budgetary stability. Next is Nigeria. Venezuela is next. Under $100 but over $60 are Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Let’s think about this oil battle in a geopolitical context. BCA Research defines it as a “regional proxy war.” They identify the antagonists as Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is that simple when it comes to oil. Saudis use oil as a weapon, and they intend to weaken their most significant enemy on the other side of the water in their neighborhood. But the outcome also pressures a bunch of other bad guys, including Russia, to achieve some resolution of the situation in Ukraine.

There are victims in the oil patch: energy stocks, exploration and production, and related energy construction and engineering. Anything that is tied to oil price in the energy patch is subject to economic weakness because of the downward price pressure. On the other hand, volumes are enhanced and remain intact. If anything, one can expect consumption to rise because the prices have fallen. Favoring volume-oriented energy consumption investment rather than price-sensitive energy investment is a transition that investing agents need to consider. At Cumberland, we are underweight energy stock ETFs. We sold last autumn and have not bought back.  We favor volume oriented exposures, including certain MLPs.

We believe that the US economic growth rate is going to improve. In 2015, it will record GDP rate of change levels above 3.5%. Evidence suggests that the US economy will finally resume classic longer term trend rates above 3%. It will do so in the context of very low interest and inflation rates, a gradual but ongoing improvement in labor markets, and the powerful influences of a strengthening US dollar and a tightening US budget deficit. The American fiscal condition is good and improving rapidly. The American monetary condition is stabilizing. The American banking system has already been through a crisis and now seems to be adequately protected and reserved.

Our view is bullish for the US economy and stock market. We have held to that position through volatility, and we expect more volatility. When interest rates, growth rates, and trends are normalized, volatilities are normalized. They are now more normal than those that were distorted and dampened by the ongoing zero interest rate policy of the last six years.

Volatility restoration is not a negative market item. It is a normalizing item. We may wind up seeing the VIX and the stock market rise at the same time. Volatility is bidirectional.

We remain nearly fully invested in our US ETF portfolios. We expect more volatility in conjunction with an upward trend in the US stock market.

High volatility means adjustments must be made, and sometimes they require fast action. This positive outlook could change at any time. So Cumberland clients can expect to see changes in their accounts when information and analysis suggest that we move quickly.

Disclosure:

The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Cumberland Advisors is not affiliated with FOLIOfn or The Portfolioist.

Related Links:

• Saving Through the Ages
• Is the Fed Really “Stealing from Savers”?
• 6 Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Invest Like a Professional Trader

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC.

Am I Effectively Diversified?

This is the sixth installment in our series on how individual investors can assess their financial health.

Diversification is a perennial topic among investors, and if it seems controversial at times, that may be due to the fact that people don’t always share the same understanding of what it means. But diversification isn’t about investing in a certain number of securities or funds. And it’s not about investing in every possible security under the sun.

 

Diversification and Risk

Simply put, diversification is the process of combining investments that don’t move in lockstep with each other. For example, Treasury bonds tend to do well when stocks are falling, and vice versa.  Combining stocks and bonds thus helps to limit risk.  Bonds also reduce the risk of a portfolio because they tend to be less risky on a standalone basis than stocks.

This brings us to an important point: the aggregate risk/return properties of a portfolio depend not only on the risk and return of the assets themselves, but also on the relationships between them.  Determining the right balance among these three factors (asset risk, asset return, and diversification benefit) is the challenge of diversification.

A Diversification Self-Assessment

The starting point in the determining whether your portfolio is properly diversified is to come up with a risk level that matches your needs.  I discussed risk estimation in last week’s blog.  Assuming you have a target risk level for your portfolio, you can then attempt to determine how to combine assets so as to achieve the maximum expected return for this risk.

The word “expected” is crucial here.  It is easy to look back and to see, for example, that simply holding 100% of your assets in U.S. stocks would have been a winning strategy over the past five years or so.  The trailing five year return of the S&P 500 is 15.7% per year and there has not been a 10% drop in over 1,000 days.  Over this period, holding assets in almost any other asset class has only reduced portfolio return and risk reduction does not look like a critical issue when volatility is this low.  The problem, of course, is that you invest on the basis of expected future returns and you have to account for the fact that there is enormous uncertainty as to what U.S. stocks will do going forward. Diversification is important because we have limited insight into the future.

Many investors think that they are diversified because they own a number of different funds.  Owning multiple funds that tend to move together may result in no diversification benefit at all, however.  A recent analysis of more than 1,000,000 individual investors found that their portfolios were substantially under-diversified.  The level of under-diversification, the authors estimated, could result in a reduction of lifetime wealth accumulation of almost one fifth (19%).

Additional Diversifiers

Aside from a broad U.S. stock index (S&P 500, e.g., IVV or VFINX) and a broad bond index (e.g., AGG or VBMFX), what other asset classes are worth considering?

• Because the S&P 500 is oriented to very large companies, consider adding an allocation to small cap stocks, such as with a Russell 2000 index (e.g. IWM or NAESX).
• There is also considerable research that suggests that value stocks—those stocks with relatively low price-to-earnings or price-to-book values—have historically added to performance as well. A large cap value fund (e.g. VTV, IWD, VIVAX) or small cap value fund (e.g. VBR, RZV) may be a useful addition to a portfolio.
• In addition to domestic stocks, consider some allocation to international stocks (e.g. EFA or VGTSX) and emerging markets (e.g. EEM or VEIEX).
• Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) invest in commercial and residential real estate, giving investors share in the rents on these properties. There are a number of REIT index funds (e.g. ICF, RWR, and VGSIX).
• Utility stock index funds (e.g. XLU) can be a useful diversifier because they have properties of stocks (shareholders own a piece of the company) and bonds (utilities tend to pay a stable amount of income), but have fairly low correlation to both.
• Preferred shares (as represented by a fund such as PFF) also have some properties of stocks and some of bonds.
• Another potential diversifier is gold (GLD).

 

Diversification Example

To help illustrate the potential value of diversification, I used a portfolio simulation tool (Quantext Portfolio Planner, which I designed) to estimate how much additional return one might expect from adding a number of the asset classes listed above to a portfolio that originally consists of just an S&P 500 fund and a bond fund.

Risk and return for a 2-asset portfolio as compared with a more diversified portfolio (source: author’s calculations)

The estimated return of a portfolio that is 70% allocated to the S&P 500 and 30% allocated to an aggregate bond index fund is 6.4% per year with volatility of 13%.  (Volatility is a standard measure of risk.)  Compare that to the more diversified portfolio I designed, which has the same expected volatility, but an expected return of 7.3% per year, as estimated by the portfolio simulation tool.  The diversified portfolio is not designed or intended to be an optimal portfolio, but rather simply to show how a moderate allocation to a number of other asset classes can increase expected return without increasing portfolio risk.[1]

The process of analyzing diversified portfolios can get quite involved and there are many ideas about how best to do so.  But the range of analysis suggests that a well-diversified portfolio could add 1%-2% per year to portfolio return.

Conclusions

I have observed that the longer a bull market in U.S. stocks goes on, the more financial writers will opine that diversifying across asset classes is pointless.  We are in just that situation now, as witnessed by a recent article on SeekingAlpha titled Retirees, All You Need is the S&P 500 and Cash.

On the other hand, there is a large body of research that demonstrates that, over longer periods, diversification is valuable in managing risk and enhancing returns.  That said, a simple allocation to stocks and bonds has the virtue of simplicity and can be attained with very low cost.  Diversifying beyond these two assets can meaningfully increase return or reduce risk, but an increase in average return of 1%-2% per year is not going to take the sting out of a 20%+ market decline.  What’s more, a diversified portfolio is quite likely to substantially under-perform the best-performing asset class in any given time period.

But over long periods of time, the gain of 1%-2% from diversification is likely to increase your wealth accumulation over 30 years by 20%-30%.  This is consistent with the analysis of 1,000,000 individual investors cited above, from which the authors concluded that under-diversified portfolios were likely to reduce lifetime wealth accumulation by 19%.

For investors seeking to diversify beyond a low cost stock-bond mix, there are a number of simple portfolios that include a range of the asset classes discussed here and that have fairly long track records.  These are worth exploring as a template for further diversifying your own portfolio.

[1] For details on how the model estimates risk and return for different asset classes and for portfolios, see the whitepaper I wrote on the subject.

 

Related Links:

• Is My Portfolio at the Right Risk Level?
• Am I Better Off Investing or Paying Down Debt?
• Am I Saving Enough in an Emergency Fund?

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC.

Is My Portfolio at the Right Risk Level?

This is the fifth installment in our series on how individual investors can assess their financial health.

At every stage of investing, you should periodically ask yourself how much risk you can realistically tolerate. The primary way to measure the risk level of your portfolio is to look at its allocation of stocks vs. bonds.  Although some stock and bond ETFs  are riskier than others, your first decision has to be how much of your investments to put in stocks and how much in bonds.

One standard rule of thumb that’s a good place to start is the “age in bonds” axiom. According to this guideline, you invest a percentage of assets equal to your age in a broad bond index, and the balance of your portfolio in a diversified stock portfolio.  The idea here is that your portfolio should become more conservative as you get older. This makes sense for two reasons:

1. You tend to get wealthier as you age, so any given percentage loss from your portfolio represents an increasingly larger dollar value.
2. You are gradually converting your human capital (your ability to work and earn money) into financial capital (investments) as you age. And as you get older, your financial assets represent a larger and larger fraction of your lifetime wealth potential.

For these reasons, it makes sense  to manage this pool of assets more conservatively as time goes by.

Beyond “Age in Bonds” – Choosing Your Allocation of Stocks and Bonds

The past decade provides a powerful example of the tradeoffs between risk and return.  The table below shows the year-by-year returns for portfolios comprising different mixes of an S&P 500 ETF (IVV) and a broad bond ETF (AGG).  The returns include the expense ratios of the ETFs, but no adjustment is made for brokerage fees.

Source: Author’s calculations and Morningstar

Over the 10-year period from 2004 through 2013, a portfolio that is entirely allocated to the S&P 500 ETF has an average annual return of 9.2%.  In its worst year over this period, 2008, this portfolio lost almost 37% of its value.  As the percentage of the portfolio allocated to stocks declines, the average return goes down. But the worst 12-month loss also becomes markedly less severe.

We cannot say, with any certainty, that these statistics for the past ten years are representative of what we can expect in the future, but they do provide a reasonable basis for thinking about how much risk might be appropriate.

Ask yourself: If these figures are what you could expect, what allocation of stocks vs. bonds would you choose?  Would you be willing to lose 37% in a really bad year to make an average of 9.2% per year?  Or would you prefer to sacrifice 1.5% per year to reduce the potential worst-case loss by one third?  If so, the 70% stock / 30% bond portfolio provides this tradeoff.

Planning around Improbable Events

One might object that 2008 was an extreme case, and that such a bad year is unlikely to recur with any meaningful probability.  One way to correct for this potential bias towards extreme events is to assume that returns from stocks and bonds follow a bell curve distribution, a common way to estimate investment risk.  Using the data over the last ten years to estimate the properties of the bell curve (also known as the “normal” or Gaussian distribution), I have estimated the probabilities of various levels of loss over a 12-month period.

Estimated 12-month loss percentiles for a ‘normal’ distribution (Source: author’s calculations)

When you look at the figures for the 5^th percentile loss, you can see what might be expected in the worst 5% of 12-month periods for each of the five portfolio types. For example, the 100% stock portfolio has a 1-in-20 chance of returning -21% or worse over the next twelve months. Note that a loss of 35% for stocks, similar to 2008, is estimated to have a probability of 1-in-100.

It’s important to point out that the ability to calculate the probability of very rare events is very poor.  Perhaps 2008 really was a 1-in-100 probability event, but we don’t know that with any certainty.  The most catastrophic events (what Nassim Taleb has famously dubbed “Black Swans”) are so severe and outside our normal range of experience that they tend to catch us totally off guard.

Moshe Milevsky, a well-known retirement planning expert, suggests that rather than thinking in terms of probabilities, it’s sensible to set your portfolio’s risk to a level that ensures that the worst case outcomes are survivable. Based on that, it’s prudent to choose a portfolio risk level that won’t ruin you if there’s another year like 2008. If you can survive a 12-month loss of 23% (the average of the worst loss for this allocation over the past ten years and the estimated worst-case 1^st percentile return), for example, you can afford to hold a 70% equity portfolio.

Final Thoughts

If your investments in stocks don’t approximate the S&P 500, the stock portion of your portfolio may be considerably riskier than the table above implies.  Allocations to emerging markets, small companies, and technology stocks can be very volatile. The examples shown here provide a starting point in determining risk.  Combining a wider range of asset classes can provide important diversification benefits beyond their individual risk levels, but this topic is beyond my scope here.

The past ten years have provided examples of very high returns and very low returns from stocks. This period gives us a useful basis for testing our tolerance for volatility.  Many readers, I imagine, will find that their risk tolerance—self-diagnosed from looking at the tables above—corresponds reasonably well to the “age in bonds” rule. If your choice of risk levels is too far from these levels, a closer look is needed—and perhaps a talk with an investment advisor.

Related Links:

• Am I Better Off Investing or Paying Down Debt?
• Am I Saving Enough in an Emergency Fund?
• Am I Saving Enough to Reach My Goals?

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Am I Saving Enough to Reach My Goals?

This is the second installment in our series on how individual investors can assess their financial health.

The starting point for any discussion of a household’s financial health is to evaluate current savings and savings rates in the context of financial goals.  The three largest expenses that most families will face are buying a home, paying for college, and providing income in retirement. Setting specific savings targets and timelines is a key step in increasing your ability to meet these goals.

To determine whether you are saving enough to pay for one or more of these goals, consider the following factors:

• Expected total cost of goal
• When the money is needed
• Current amount saved for the goal
• Expected annual rate of saving towards the goal
• How much risk to take in investing to meet the goal

Retirement

A good first step for estimating how much you’ll need for retirement—and how you’re doing so far—is to try Morningstar’s Retirement Savings Calculator.  This tool uses a range of sensible assumptions (which you can read about in the study from which it was developed) to estimate whether you are saving enough to retire.  The study accounts for the fact that Social Security represents a different fraction of retirement income for households at different income levels and assumes that investments are consistent with those of target date mutual funds.  The calculator scales income from your current age forward, based on historical average rates of wage growth.

The calculations assume that you will need 80% of your pre-retirement income after subtracting retirement contributions, and that you will retire at age 65.  The estimated future returns for the asset allocations are provided by Ibbotson, a well-regarded research firm (and wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar).

The final output of this model is a projected savings rate that is required for you to meet the target amounts of income.  If this is less than you currently save, you are ahead of the game.

College

There are enormous variations in what a college education costs, depending on whether your child goes to a public or private institution and whether those who choose public schools stay in-state.  There is also a trend towards spending two years at a community college before transferring to a larger comprehensive university.    estimates that the average annual all-in cost of attending a public four-year university is $23,000 per year, while the cost of attending a private four-year university averages $45,000 per year.  This includes tuition, room, board, books and other incidentals.  It is worth noting, however, that the all-in cost of private universities are often far above $45,000 per year.  The University of Chicago has an all-in cost of $64,000 per year.  Yale comes in at $58,500.

Every college and university has information on current costs to attend, as well as a calculator that estimates how much financial aid you can expect to be given, based on your income and assets.  There are a variety of ways to reduce the out-of-pocket cost of college including work-study, cooperative education programs, and ROTC.  There are also scholarships, of course.

College tuition and fees have been rising at about 4% per year beyond inflation for the past three decades.  With inflation currently at about 2%, the expected annual increase in college costs is 6%.

To be conservative, assume that money invested today in a moderate mix of stocks and bonds will just keep up with inflation in college costs.  Vanguard’s Moderate Growth 529 plan investment option has returned an average of 6.9% per year since inception in 2002 and 6.4% per year over the past ten years.  In other words, $23,000 invested today will probably pay for a year at a public four-year university in the future.  You can invest more aggressively to achieve higher returns, but taking more risk also introduces an increased exposure to market declines.

Using the simple assumption that money invested today in a moderately risky 529 plan or other account is likely to just keep pace with cost inflation makes it easy to figure out how you are doing in terms of saving.  If you plan to pay the cost of your child’s four-year in-state education and you have $46,000 invested towards this goal, you are halfway there.

Buying a Home

A house is a major financial commitment—one of the most significant that most people make.  Unlike retirement or education, there is an alternative that provides the same key benefits: renting.

For people who decide to buy, a key issue is how much to save for a down payment.  The amount that a lender will require depends on your income, credit score, and other debts.  Zillow.com provides a nice overview, along with an interactive calculator of down payment requirements. This tool can help estimate how all of the factors associated with obtaining a mortgage can vary with the down payment.

In general, the goal is to have a down payment ranging from 5% to 20% of what you plan to spend on a home.  By experimenting with the calculator at Zillow, you can determine how much house you can afford and how much you will need to put down.  A down payment of 20% or more is the most cost-effective route because smaller down payments require that you buy mortgage insurance, which adds to the monthly payment.

There are several alternatives for investing a down payment fund.  The primary consideration, however, is whether you are willing to adjust your timeframe based on how the market performs.  If you are committed to buying a house within one to three years, you really cannot afford to take on much risk.  If you are looking at a timeframe of five years or more—or if you hope to buy in one to three years but you are comfortable delaying if market returns are poor—you can afford to take more risk.  There is no single answer for everyone.

If you are investing only in low-risk assets, however, estimating how much you need to save each month for a required down payment is straightforward enough, because the current expected rate of return on safe assets is close to zero.

 

Related Links:

• How Am I Doing? An 8-Point Financial Checklist
• The Future of Retail Banking
• Goldman Sachs Predicts 4.5% 10-year Treasury Notes

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC.

 

How Am I Doing? An 8-Point Financial Checklist

A question that nags at many people is whether they are on track financially.  Even an average financial life can seem remarkably complex.  How does anyone know whether he or she is doing the right things?  A range of studies on how people manage their money suggests that many, if not the majority, are making choices that look decidedly sub-optimal.  Americans don’t save enough money and when they do save and invest, they often make basic mistakes that substantially reduce their returns.  More than 60% of self-directed investors have portfolios with inappropriate risk levels.  Almost three quarters of Americans have little or no emergency savings.  The solution to these problems starts with an assessment of where you are and where you need to be.

The key, as Einstein once said, is to make things as simple as possible but no simpler.  In an attempt to provide a checklist that’s in line with this edict, I offer the following questions that each person or family needs to be able to answer.

The first three questions focus on consumption and saving:

1. Am I saving enough for to meet personal goals such as retirement, college education, and home ownership?
2. Am I saving enough for contingencies such as a job loss or an emergency?
3. Am I investing when I should be paying down debt instead, or vice-versa?

The next five questions deal with how you invest the money that you save:

1. Is my portfolio at the right risk level?
2. Am I effectively diversified?
3. Am I aware of how much am I paying in expenses?
4. Are my financial decisions tax efficient?
5. Should I hire an investment advisor?

Anyone who can answer all eight of these questions satisfactorily has a strong basis for assessing whether he or she is on track. Odds are there are more than a few questions here that most of us either don’t have the answer to or know that we are not addressing very well.

Part of what makes answering these questions challenging is that the experiences of previous generations are often of limited relevance, especially when it comes to life’s three biggest expenditures: retirement, college, and housing.

For example, older people who have traditional pensions that guarantee a lifetime of income in retirement simply didn’t need to worry about choosing how much they had to save to support themselves during retirement.

The cost of educating children has also changed, increasing much faster than inflation or, more crucially, household income.  For many in the older generation, college was simply not a consideration. It has become the norm, however, and borrowing to pay for college is now the second largest form of debt in America, surpassed only by home mortgages.  Children and, more often their parents, must grapple with the question of how much they can or should pay for a college education, along with the related question of whether a higher-ranked college is worth the premium cost.

The third of the big three expenses that most families face is housing costs. Following the Second World War, home buyers benefitted from an historic housing boom.  Their children, the Baby Boomers, have also seen home prices increase substantially over most of their working careers.  Even with the huge decline in the housing crash, many Boomer home owners have done quite well with real estate.    Younger generations (X, Y, and Millenials), by contrast, have experienced enormous volatility in housing prices and must also plan for more uncertainty in their earnings.  And of course, what you decide you can afford to spend on a home has implications for every other aspect of your financial life.

In addition to facing major expenses without a roadmap provided by previous generations, we also need to plan for the major known expenses of everyday life. It’s critically important to determine how much to keep in liquid emergency savings and how to choose whether to use any additional available funds to pay down debts or to invest.  There are general guidelines to answering these questions and we will explore these in a number of future posts.

The second set of questions is easier to answer than the first.  These are all questions about how to effectively invest savings to meet future needs.  Risk, diversification, expenses, and tax exposure can be benchmarked against professional standards of practice.

What can become troubling, however, is that experts disagree about the best approach to addressing a number of these factors.  When in doubt, simplicity and low cost are typically the best choices.  Investors could do far worse than investing in a small number of low-cost index funds and choosing the percentages to stocks and bonds based on their age using something like the ‘age in bonds’ rule.  There are many ways to try for better returns at a given risk level, and some make far more sense than others.  Even Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor in the world, endorses a simple low-cost index fund strategy.  Upcoming posts will provide a number of straightforward standards for addressing these questions.

Investors who find these questions  too burdensome or time consuming to deal with may wish to spend some time on the eighth and final question: whether they should hire an investment advisor to guide them.  Investors may ultimately choose to manage their own finances, search out a human advisor, or use an online computer-driven advisory service.

While financial planning can seem complex and intimidating, our series of blog posts on the key issues, as outlined in the eight questions above, will provide a framework by which individuals can effectively take control and manage their financial affairs.

Related Links:

• The Future of Retail Banking
• Goldman Sachs Predicts 4.5% 10-year Treasury Notes
• Investing Implications or Trends in Household Wealth

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC.

 

Investing Implications of Trends in Household Wealth

Shifting Wealth

A new study released by the Russell Sage Foundation analyzes trends in household wealth over the last twenty years, with a focus on the years surrounding the ‘great recession’ of 2008.  The study examines changes in household net worth for the median household, as well as for the 95^th percentile of households by wealth (the richest 5%), the poorest 25% of households (the 25^th percentile) and tiers in between.

Source: Russell Sage Foundation

The results, adjusted for inflation (values are shown in 2013 dollars), show that the median U.S. household remains substantially poorer in terms of total net worth than it was before the recession and is actually now poorer than it was in the mid 1980’s.  What’s more, median household net worth has not recovered at all since the great recession.  The same trends are evident even for the wealthiest quarter of households (the 75^th percentile), although the gains in wealth by this tier of households in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s were sufficiently great that the top quarter of households by wealth is more than 25% wealthier today than in the mid 80’s.

The most striking feature of this chart is the spread in wealth levels.  While the median and 25^th percentiles of households by wealth are substantially poorer today than they were twenty years ago, the wealthiest 10% (the 90^th percentile) and the wealthiest 5%, in particular, are substantially richer today.  The increasing spread between the percentiles through time is evidence of growing inequality.  The study concludes that much of the divergence between wealthier and poorer households reflects the proportion of their wealth held in homes vs. stocks and bonds.  Housing prices remain well below their previous peaks in 2007, while the equity markets have regained their previous levels.  For poorer households, homes represents the vast majority of their net worth.  This is not the case for wealthier households.  The results of this study are consistent with other analysis—this is confirmation rather than being surprising.  Nonetheless, each new set of results that are consistent adds weight.

Implications for Investors

The implications of the trends in the table above are substantial.  If the median household is seeing declining or stagnant wealth levels—with more extreme declines for poorer households—this will ultimately reduce their capacity to buy and consume goods and services.  Indeed, the Russell Sage study concludes that declining household wealth shows that poorer households, unable to support their current consumption with income, are gradually depleting their assets.  At the other end of the spectrum, the wealthiest 10% of households has seen a substantial decline in net worth as well, even though this tier enjoyed huge gains in the past twenty years.

Aside from the fact that declining household wealth reduces the ability to spend, there is also the problem of the wealth effect.  Households that have disposable income are less likely to spend it if they feel less wealthy and even the 95^th percentile of households by wealth is less wealthy than it was just five years ago.

The simplest interpretation of these data are that mid-market retail products and retailers are going to suffer, while the budget products and retailers and the luxury markets will perform relatively better.  So, for example, Family Dollar stores (FDO), WalMart (WMT), Costco (COST) and other discount retailers should do well.  More broadly, however, the declining disposable incomes for the middle tier of investors suggests that the companies that provide the basic products and services that people depend upon are good bets.  Utilities (IDU), oil companies (IGE), and pharmaceutical companies (JNJ, BMY, GSK, PFE) are fairly well insulated from changes in wealth distribution.

The more challenging questions involve discretionary goods and services that are higher-priced and easier to do without or that can be displaced by lower-cost competitors.  Companies like Bed, Bath, and Beyond (BBBY), Whole Foods (WFM), Abercrombie and Fitch (ANF), and Express (EXPR) sell products for which there are cheaper and largely indistinguishable alternatives.  The winners in this mid-market business are those companies that provide fairly low-cost products while retaining brand appeal to wealthier customers (SBUX, CMG, NKE).

Another theme that looks promising is consumer products that are expensive relative to peers but that represent a low-cost substitution as compared to other types of conspicuous consumption.  Apple (AAPL) has successfully capitalized on this trend.  The new iPhone may be expensive compared to other phones, but it is fairly cheap as a prestige object.   Smart phones also provide low-cost entertainment via product offerings such as Facebook (FB).  People who spend their time surfing Facebook or watching Netflix (NFLX) are likely to see cable TV as expensive.  This realization is already expressed in the high prices of these firms relative to their earnings, however.

The Take-Away

The latest data on growing wealth inequality add support to the conclusion that the middle tier of American families is getting squeezed.  The long-term implications for how people spend their money are worth considering.  The ultimate losers will be companies that sell fairly high-cost goods or services to the middle class for which there are low-cost alternatives and for which there are up-market competitors that appeal to wealthier families.  One class of winners will be low-cost ‘prestige’ brands such as smart phones and Starbucks coffee.  It is hard to imagine the average urban millennial substituting his iPhone for generic pay-as-you-go hardware or rushing to the office with a cup of gas station coffee rather than the iconic Starbucks cup.  As discretionary wealth gets tighter for the middle tier, low-cost mobile entertainment looks like a winner at the expense of cable and satellite TV.

The discount retailers and providers of basic goods such as fuels and pharmaceuticals are likely to hold up well simply because changing wealth distributions will have little impact on their businesses.

Related Links:

• Low Beta Market Sectors
• REITs and the Rally of 2014
• Understanding How Fund Performance Comparisons Overstate Returns

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC.

Low Beta Market Sectors

With U.S. equity markets near their record highs and a bull market run that is starting its sixth year, the potential for a correction is a growing concern.  In addition, U.S. equity prices look fairly high when viewed in terms of the PE10 ratio.  Another factor that concerns some market watchers is that volatility (as measured by VIX) is at very low levels, reminiscent of 2007.  This type of complacency has historically been followed by increasing volatility, as levels return to their historical average, accompanied by a sell-off in higher-risk assets as investors adjust their portfolios to mitigate the effects of higher volatility.

Investors seeking to remain invested in equities at a target level but who want to reduce their exposure to market swings and to mitigate the impact of a rise in market volatility have historically been well-served by increasing their allocations to low-beta market sectors.  In this article, I will review the defensive value of low-beta allocations as well as examining the consistency of beta over time.

Beta measures the degree to which a security or a portfolio responds to a move in a benchmark index such as the S&P500.  A portfolio with beta equal to 80% (also written as 0.8) tends to go up 0.8% when the market rises 1.0% and vice versa.  Beta may be thought of as showing whether a security amplifies the moves in the benchmark (beta greater than 100%) or damps the moves in the benchmark (beta less than 100%).

How Beta Varies by Sector

The SPDR Select Sector ETFs provide a convenient way to break out the sectors of the U.S. equity markets by dividing the S&P500 into nine sectors.  These sectors illustrate how much beta varies.

Betas and 10-year average annual returns for major sectors and indexes

The S&P500 has a beta of 100%, by definition.  Some readers may be surprised that emerging market stocks have beta of almost 140%, which means that emerging market equities tend to go up (down) 1.4% for every 1% gain (drop) in the S&P500.  Even before the market crash of 2008, emerging market stocks were high beta—this is not a new phenomenon.

There are three U.S. equity sectors with betas well below 100%: consumer staples (XLP), healthcare (XLV), and utilities (XLU).  It is often believed that low-beta equities have very low average returns.  In fact, a well-known but now widely-discounted model of equity returns (the Capital Asset Pricing Model, CAPM) assumes that beta of an equity or asset class corresponds directly to expected return.  High-beta asset classes have high expected return and vice versa.  Low-beta equities have historically substantially out-performed what would be expected on the basis of CAPM, however, and the past ten years is no exception.  These three sectors have all out-performed the S&P500 over the past ten years.  The return numbers shown here are the arithmetic averages, including reinvested dividends.

Low Beta Asset Classes in 2007-2008

The first question that is worth asking about beta is the degree to which beta corresponds to losses in really bad market conditions.  In the table below, I have tabulated beta calculated using three years of data through 2007 for each of the funds above, as well as the returns for each of these in 2008.

Beta calculated through 2007 vs. 2008 returns

The three sectors with the lowest betas going into 2008 (consumer staples, healthcare, and utilities) had an average return of -22.3% in 2008, as compared to -36.8% for the S&P500.  An equity tilt towards these lower beta sectors could have reduced losses in that year.

Consistency of Beta through Time

The astute reader may notice that the betas calculated using ten years of data through May of 2014 (shown in the first table) are, in some cases, quite different from the betas calculated using three years of data through December of 2007 (shown in the second table).  Beta varies through time.  The betas calculated using three years of data through May 2014 provide an interesting contrast to the three-year betas through the end of 2007.

Comparing betas for two 3-year periods

We are looking at two distinct 3-year periods, separated by almost six and a half years and, in general, low-beta sectors at the end of 2007 remain low-beta today and high-beta sectors back then are still high-beta.  The two most notable exceptions are international equities (EFA) and the technology sectors (XLK).  These changes notwithstanding, the three sectors with the lower betas in 2007 also have the lowest betas in 2014.

There are a number of factors that will determine whether any sector will weather a broad market decline better than others.  Beta is one important factor, but there are others.  In 2008, the financial sector suffered disproportionately large losses—well beyond what would have been expected on the basis of beta alone.  The underlying drivers of the 2008 market crash were most severe in the financial sector.  Small-cap stocks, by contrast, fell considerably less than the beta value of this sector would have suggested.

Low-Beta and Asset Allocation

Low-beta asset classes have historically provided some protection from market declines and increasing volatility.  There are a range of other considerations that potential investors should consider, however when creating a portfolio.  The selection of individual asset classes should be made with consideration of the characteristics of the total portfolio, including desired risk level, interest rate exposure, and income generation.  The target for total portfolio beta is primarily determined by an investor’s total risk tolerance.  A target beta level can be achieved both by choosing how to allocate the equity portion of a portfolio among sectors and by varying the balance between equity (stocks) and fixed income (bonds) investments.  Fixed income asset classes tend to have very low—even negative—values of beta.  In my next blog entry, I will explore these two approaches to managing beta at the portfolio level.

History suggests that low-beta sectors can provide some protection from market downturns.  The length of the current equity rally, and the substantial increases in equity valuations in recent years, are motivating some investors to consider their best defensive alternatives to protect against the inevitable reversal.  The question for investors to ask themselves is whether they are best-served by reducing portfolio beta by reducing their exposure to equities, by shifting some portion of assets from high-beta to low-beta sector, or both.

Related Links:

• REITs and the Rally of 2014
• Understanding How Fund Performance Comparisons Overstate Returns
• Is Twitter the Canary in the Coal Mine?

The brokerage with a better way. Securities products and services offered through FOLIOfn Investments, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC.