FOMO can be rational

Friday, July 5th, 2024

“Probability of unacceptable losses in US equities less than 3%”

Sometimes it helps to look at the world from another perspective. Most institutional investment regard risk as a cost, something which must be used efficiently. But there is another approach, which views volatility as something which enables high returns, which should be accepted, provided that the asset can be sold when losses are worse than those which are predicted from the distribution of returns. This view is typically associated with retail investors and the benchmark asset for comparison purposes is normally cash. If we use this approach, based on data for the last four quarters, we find that the probability of incurring unacceptable losses in US Equities is less than 3%. Sure, it’s a short data set, but with numbers like this, FOMO can be rational.

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Focus on Fixed Income

Friday, November 17th, 2023

High Yield has the best yield to volatility ratio

Our top-down models are now overweight fixed income, so maybe it is time to work out exactly which categories we want to own and why. We have always liked the yield to volatility ratio, chiefly because it is a good lead indicator of the Sharpe ratio, which an asset will deliver. It contains more information than a study of spreads relative to benchmark, and avoids the underlying assumption that these are somehow mean-reverting. High Yield scores very well on this metric and has done for most of the last two years, which is why we have it as the only category in our fixed income model, where we are overweight relative to benchmark.

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How to Manage Falling Treasuries

Wednesday, September 14th, 2016

Buy Credits where volatility is still falling

We think that the best way dealing with falling Treasuries is to stay in fixed income and to seek out situations in the credit markets, which are priced for high levels of risk, and where volatility is still falling. The problem with reducing duration or buying inflation-linked bonds is that the Fed and other central banks can force you to unwind it if they want to.

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