Apr 22, 2010
in Drawdown, Volatility
Lately I have read in a few places that "investors too often equate risk with volatility." The people who say these kinds of things rarely go on to present an argument based in statistical fact. This blog post is not to say anything is absolute --- but I will show some simple recent data that hardly refutes the statement put forth on the first page of Chapter 3 in ‘the bible’ of quantitative finance ‘Active Portfolio Management’ (Grinold & Kahn, 1999): – it could not be much clearer: “Risk is the standard deviation of return.”
Below is data from the past bear market for 5 of the largest ETF’s in the world. I have chosen to use the standard deviation of the period PRIOR to 2008, Q4 2007. I then show the subsequent drawdown in 2008. Note how in each case of higher standard deviation, the drawdown was larger in the NEXT period.
While the above is just a sample --- I can show this over many, many more ETF's. Thinking about your portfolio from the viewpoint of standard deviation can help you understand at least in some small way about how your portfolio might drawdown relative to some common benchmarks. This chart shows volatilities across these same 5 ETF's over time. Note that each ETF has held its relative position for the past 3 years -- zero change. While you cannot know with precision what the future holds -- you can to some extent understand your relative drawdown given S&P volatility of XX.
Apr 20, 2010
in Relative Strength, Video
4 minute video going over a few recent examples:
Feb 24, 2010
in Correlation
I know that this may be implied by others --- but its not enough that something simply be non-correlated to be included in a portfolio. It also needs to have positive expected return.
Structurally speaking, commodities markets are both 1) quite volatile and 2) generally quite sensitive to the overall economy -- which is what the stock market is sensitive to. In times of crisis, its been shown over and over again that correlations generally rise, so that you thought you were getting non-correlation, but instead you just get a more volatile asset that delivers an even larger drawdown for your portfolio. An excellent example is what just happened with crude oil in 2008, see images:
Jan 26, 2010
What has currency done to US bond market returns for foreign investors? While various currencies have performed notably differently, the overall Deutsche Bank Dollar Index ETF is a good proxy to make a weighted judgment of overall effect. Since February 2007, when the UUP was launched, there has been a depreciation of the dollar of about -6%. With domestic currency bond market index returns in the +17 to +19% over this period and understanding that some currencies fared much better or worse than the underlying DB dollar index, you can see that currency can be quite a meaningful contribution to overall return.
To update this chart to today or visualize similar relationships using other ETF combinations, go here: http://www.etfreplay.com/charts.aspx
Jan 23, 2010
Ken Heebner is considered one of the very best fund managers in the country. But during this period of time, his fund was simply no different than the Brazil Fund ETF. This is an example of a fund manager exposing customers to a risk factor that they could have purchased in an ETF at a significantly lower fee. While Heebner should be credited for his outstanding long-term track record, his value-add -- like nearly all fund managers -- is in choosing broad risk expsosures, not 'stock-picking'. Moreover, he exposed customers to tremendous risk -- which could have been easily recognized if tracking his daily standard deviation of his funds returns -- as ETFreplay.com does.
