Insights
Systematic Liquid Alternatives: A New Perspective On Alpha
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Insight Article
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June 26, 2024
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June 26, 2024
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Systematic Liquid Alternatives: A New Perspective On Alpha |
Key Takeaways
Using Systematic Liquid Alternatives for Cost-Effective Diversification
The painful failures of traditional sources of diversification in recent years have crystallized the need to incorporate truly uncorrelated, complementary sources of return into traditional portfolios, beyond the classic 60% equity / 40% bond mix. Equity and fixed income indexes ended 2023 near their highest correlation on record, as these two assets comprising the universal standard ‘balanced portfolio’ moved in relative lockstep for most of the preceding 24 months. Display 1 shows that this stretch was no fluke: the two asset classes have historically gone through long stretches of significant positive correlation.
Investors have responded with increasing interest in alternative investments, to pursue greater downside mitigation and gain differentiated market exposures. Over the past several decades, the universe of alternatives experienced substantial growth, and evolved to encompass myriad asset classes, structures, and strategies.
Hedge funds, in particular, have long been a popular vehicle for accessing these differentiated exposures. Hedge fund returns are often generated with very little reliance on the overall market, meaning the alpha generated is typically diversifying to traditional stock and bond investments. As the universe of hedge funds and other alternative assets has grown and evolved, so too has our understanding of the drivers of their returns. As a result, we now have a more granular picture of alpha as a combination of three elements: skill, the liquidity premium, and alternative risk premia (ARP). We believe this insight into alpha has important positive implications for investors seeking new tools for diversification through liquid alternative funds.
A New Perspective on Alpha
Our beliefs around alpha sources build on the concepts that were originated in the 1960s with the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM, Jack Treynor, William Sharpe and others), which was later expanded into the Three-Factor Model in the 1990s (Fama and French). These practitioners determined that, broadly speaking, a fund’s total return can be decomposed into three parts: cash, beta (or exposure to market premia), and alpha (Display 2).
In early iterations, when these models were applied to alternative investments such as hedge funds, all alpha generation was attributed to manager skill. But the growth of strategies and asset classes commonly employed by hedge funds has refined our understanding of their return drivers: We have found that part of the return that had been attributed to skill, may actually have been the result of exposure to two other sources — various alternative risk premia (ARP) or the liquidity premium (Display 3).
Hedge funds and other alternative investments typically offer some combination of these three alpha types — skill, ARP, and the liquidity premium. The recognition of three different alpha types opens a more transparent window for alternatives investors to know what they own.
This insight has key implications for investors when considering both the fees associated with investing in alternative assets and the structure used to access each alpha source. Skill commands the highest fees (correctly, in our view) for the value delivered in terms of investment selection and timing. Plus, managers often have investment theses which may take time to play out, or managers may seek to capture the liquidity premium in more thinly traded or less liquid securities. Thus, we believe many hedge fund strategies are not well suited for daily liquid fund structures. As a result, hedge funds are generally offered through limited partnerships offered to qualified purchasers, usually with limited liquidity. Alternative risk premia, however, are not reliant on unique skill and are implemented in a rules-based process. Thus, we believe that ARP can potentially be offered more inexpensively to investors compared with skill-based alpha, and are well suited in open-end funds with daily liquidity.
The statements above reflect the views and opinions of the MSIM Hedge Funds Team as of the date hereof and not as of any future date, and will not be updated or supplemented.
Looking Under the ARP Hood
In financial terminology, a risk premium is the extra potential reward investors expect to receive relative to an appropriate reference. For example, the equity risk premium compensates investors for assuming systematic market risk (or beta) which is the equity market’s return over the risk-free rate.1
As the name suggests, the concept underlying alternative risk premia is the potential reward to an investor for taking on risk that is ‘alternative’ to traditional market risks or traditional beta. These risk premia often seek to exploit the fact that the performance of different groups of securities is linked by shared factors like size, value, growth, momentum, and carry. Alternative risk premia are structured in a long/short fashion, which enables managers to isolate the risk premium associated with each factor.
Consider this example. A manager who seeks to take advantage of the size premium, which refers to the tendency of small caps to outperform larger stocks over the long term, can simultaneously establish a long position in small-caps and a short position in large-caps. Any sentiment driving the market as a whole will affect both groups equally, but oppositely. The result is that the manager will capture the pure premium small-cap stocks may deliver over large-caps, independent of fluctuations in the broad market beta.
Size is just one of many risk premia, which span all geographies and, importantly, multiple asset classes, including equities, rates, commodities, currencies. In addition to size, Display 5 highlights commonly used ARP, which often result from recurring investor behavior patterns or structural conditions.
For example, momentum refers to the herding behavior of investors when they “chase winners and sell losers.” When stocks trade at below fair value, they can be classified as value stocks, based on the expectation that their prices will increase as they revert to the mean. Growth stocks are ones with high valuations in anticipation of above-average earnings growth, and are often the counterpart to value in ARP strategies. Investor mispricing of asset yields may lead to carry opportunities where investments that offer higher yields tend to outperform.
Potential Benefits of Investing in ARP
Using ARP as Building Blocks for Portfolio Diversification
While individual alternative risk premia typically access a rewarded factor, meaning a factor that has a positive expected return over the long term, on a stand-alone basis each individual factor is not necessarily expected to generate consistent, absolute returns. Factors may be in favor at different times depending on prevailing market or economic conditions, and there can be prolonged stretches of underperformance by individual risk premia, as investors with exposure to the equity value factor in the 2010s can attest. However, individual ARP have demonstrated little or no intra-strategy correlation with one another, and typically have low correlation to traditional markets, making them attractive portfolio “building blocks” (Display 6). Thus, we believe that their highest utility comes from combining multiple ARP strategies into a single diversified portfolio.
How Allocations to Liquid Alternatives Can Enhance Portfolios
A New Alpha Allocation for the 21st Century
Evolution in the alternative investment space has allowed us to evaluate and extrapolate different sources of alpha more effectively. We believe alternative risk premia — one of these alpha sources — can offer the diversification that traditional assets have struggled to provide, complement traditional multi-asset positions, and address gaps in hedge fund strategies all in a liquid, low-cost, and transparent format.