Disruptive Investing

It’s not enough to say you’ve mitigated all your risk in the face of present economic change, but one must be able to quantify, measure and modify it often, in order to stay on the maximum potential return of a chosen portfolio strategy over time periods. Note the emphasis on the plural. The dilemma, to maintain a selection of quality assets on a portfolio's efficient frontier that add incrementally more return while not adding more risk. The problem is that flushing out risk can bring you closer to the market average. Risk-based portfolio optimization schemes, such as Mean-Variance Optimization (MVO) can suffer from unintentional mistakes (decisions made) because MVO tends to weight the historically higher returning assets more heavily, at the expense of ignoring potentially higher returning assets looking forward. In other words, there may be a greater chance that a great performer may no longer perform great, and alternative assets could add a higher return while decreasing the ...

Risk is difficult to measure and to manage. ETFs and indexes exist that provide performance averages. Mutual funds suffer from overhead and management costs, loads and redemption fees. When investors are paying fund managers to reduce risk, minimize volatility and maximize returns, and they realize an industry average, index (which has no management), or T-Bill has bettered their fund, they should be upset. They have experienced an opportunity loss while taking on excessive risk, and while paying people to manage that risk. We could use a backward looking lense to hopefully get a projection of what future performance or risk-adjusted returns might be. But, people cannot make informed decisions because they cannot truly know past risk, present risk, and more importantly future risk. As the economy changes and as individual assets within a portfolio change, daily, one must have a means of contemplating different asset allocations based on reality and make necessary adjustments to maximiz...

Making money today is not easy, and managing money successfully is even harder. With the global financial and economic crisis in full swing chief investment officers of mutal fund families, mutual fund managers, and their analysts must navigate an incredibly stormy sea. It is global and it is pervasive and is affecting every asset class. New regulations, reporting requirements, ethics, moral hazard and other non-core activities weigh on the ultimate time and focus available for optimizing mutual fund portfolios. Everyone is concerned with risk, volatility, diversification and the performance of their money relative to other potential investment choices. Mutual fund managers must retain existing clients, attract new clients, and avoid the "run-on" issues of mass redemptions that severely cripple the NAV of their fund(s). How to rebalance? What equities to buy? Which ones to sell? When? Which add to returns while also reducing risk? These questions and other problems can be ame...

EARN MORE! RISK LESS! Diversification weighting, is a product of diversification optimization (of a portfolio). Allocation weights can be determined by the extent to which an asset adds uniqueness to a portfolio. Some studies show that using diversification weighting, rather than risk-based weighting, or capitalization weighting, could improve relative performance while decreasing portfolio volatility.