Alternative beta

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In traditional investments, the volatile (beta) investments are managed to balance risk and return. For alternative investments, this management is called "alternative beta". Asreturn.png
In traditional investments, the volatile (beta) investments are managed to balance risk and return. For alternative investments, this management is called "alternative beta".

Alternative beta is the concept of managing volatile "alternative investments", often through the use of hedge funds. Alternative beta is often also referred to as "alternative risk premia".

Contents

Researcher Lars Jaeger says that the return from an investment mainly results from exposure to systematic risk factors. These exposures can take two basic forms: long only "buy and hold" exposures and exposures through the use of alternative investment techniques such as long/short investing, the use of derivatives (non-linear payout profiles), or the employment of leverage) [1]

Background

Alternative investments

Although alternative investment is a general term, (commonly defined as any investment other than stocks, bonds or cash), alternative beta relates to the use of hedge funds. At its most basic, a hedge fund is an investment vehicle that pools capital from a number of investors and invests in securities and other instruments. [2] It is administered by a professional management firm, and often structured as a limited partnership, limited liability company, or similar vehicle. [3] [4]

Volatility ("beta")

For an investment that involves risk to be worthwhile, its returns must be higher than a risk-free investment. The risk is related to volatility.

A measure of the factors influencing an investment's volatility is the beta. The beta is a measure of the risk arising from exposure to general market movements as opposed to idiosyncratic factors.

A beta below 1 can indicate either an investment with lower volatility than the market, or a volatile investment whose price movements are not highly correlated with the market. An example of the first is a treasury bill: the price does not go up or down a lot, so it has a low beta. An example of the second is gold. The price of gold does go up and down a lot, but not in the same direction or at the same time as the market. [5]

A beta above 1 generally means that the asset both is volatile and tends to move up and down with the market. An example is a stock in a big technology company. Negative betas are possible for investments that tend to go down when the market goes up, and vice versa. There are few fundamental investments with consistent and significant negative betas, but some derivatives like equity put options can have large negative beta values. [6]

Investments with a high beta value are often called "beta investments", as opposed to "alpha investments" which typically have lower volatility and lower returns.

Volatility and hedge funds

Separating returns into alpha and beta can also be applied to determine the amount and type of fees to charge. The consensus is to charge higher fees for alpha (incl. performance fee), since it is mostly viewed as skill based. The topic has received increasing levels of attention due to the very rapid growth of the hedge fund industry, where investment companies typically charge fees higher than those of mutual funds, based on the assumption that hedge funds are alpha investments. Investors have started to question whether hedge funds are actually alpha investments, or just some “new” form of beta (i.e. alternative beta).

This issue was raised in the 1997 paper "Empirical Characteristics of Dynamic Trading Strategies: The Case of Hedge Funds" by William Fung and David Hsieh. Following this paper, several groups of academics (such as Thomas Schneeweis et al.) started to explain past hedge fund returns using various systematic risk factors (i.e. Alternative Betas). Following this, a paper has discussed whether investable strategies based on such factors can not only explain past returns, but also replicate future ones. [1]

Different betas based on different investment exposures

Traditional betas can be seen as those related to investments the common investor would already be experienced with (examples include stocks and most bonds). They are typically represented through indexation, and the techniques employed here are what is called “long only”. The definition of alternative beta in contrast requires the consideration of other investment techniques such as short selling, use of derivatives and leverage - techniques which are often associated with the activities of hedge funds. The underlying non-traditional investment risks are often seen as being riskier, as investors are less familiar with them.

Alpha and investments and beta investments

Viewed from the implementation side, investment techniques and strategies are the means to either capture risk premia (beta) or to obtain excess returns (alpha). Whereas returns from beta are a result of exposing the portfolio to systematic risks (traditional or alternative), alpha is an exceptional return that an investor or portfolio manager earns due to his unique skill, i.e. exploiting market inefficiencies. Academic studies as well as their performance in recent years strongly support the idea that the return from hedge funds mostly consists of (alternative) risk premia. This is the basis of the various approaches to replicate the return profile of hedge funds by direct exposures to alternative beta (hedge fund replication).

Hedge fund replication

There are currently two main approaches to replicate the return profile of hedge funds based on the idea of Alternative Betas:[ clarification needed ]

  1. directly extracting the risk premia (bottom up), an approach developed and advocated by Lars Jaeger
  2. the factor-based approach based on Sharpe's factor models and developed for hedge funds first by professors Bill Fung (London Business School), David Hsieh (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) et al.

See also

Related Research Articles

A hedge fund is an investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction and risk management techniques to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives. Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing except to institutional investors, high net worth individuals and others who are considered sufficiently sophisticated.

Passive management is an investing strategy that tracks a market-weighted index or portfolio. Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming more common in other investment types, including bonds, commodities and hedge funds.

An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund and exchange-traded product, i.e. they are traded on stock exchanges. ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds, except that ETFs are bought and sold throughout the day on stock exchanges while mutual funds are bought and sold based on their price at day's end. An ETF holds assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and/or commodities such as gold bars, and generally operates with an arbitrage mechanism designed to keep it trading close to its net asset value, although deviations can occasionally occur. Most ETFs are index funds, that is, they hold the same securities in the same proportions as a certain stock market index or bond market index. The most popular ETFs in the U.S. replicate the S&P 500 Index, the total market index, the NASDAQ-100 index, the price of gold, the "growth" stocks in the Russell 1000 Index, or the index of the largest technology companies. With the exception of non-transparent actively managed ETFs, in most cases, the list of stocks that each ETF owns, as well as their weightings, is posted daily on the website of the issuer. The largest ETFs have annual fees of 0.03% of the amount invested, or even lower, although specialty ETFs can have annual fees well in excess of 1% of the amount invested. These fees are paid to the ETF issuer out of dividends received from the underlying holdings or from selling assets.

In finance, the beta is a measure of how an individual asset moves when the overall stock market increases or decreases. Thus, beta is a useful measure of the contribution of an individual asset to the risk of the market portfolio when it is added in small quantity. Thus, beta is referred to as an asset's non-diversifiable risk, its systematic risk, market risk, or hedge ratio. Beta is not a measure of idiosyncratic risk.

In finance, statistical arbitrage is a class of short-term financial trading strategies that employ mean reversion models involving broadly diversified portfolios of securities held for short periods of time. These strategies are supported by substantial mathematical, computational, and trading platforms.

Long/short equity is an investment strategy generally associated with hedge funds, and more recently certain progressive traditional asset managers. It involves buying equities that are expected to increase in value and selling short equities that are expected to decrease in value. This is different from the risk reversal strategies where investors will simultaneously buy a call option and sell a put option to simulate being long in a stock.

Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities and other assets in order to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of the investors. Investors may be institutions or private investors.

Active management refers to a portfolio management strategy where the manager makes specific investments with the goal of outperforming an investment benchmark index or target return. In passive management, investors expect a return that closely replicates the investment weighting and returns of a benchmark index and will often invest in an index fund.

Alpha is a measure of the active return on an investment, the performance of that investment compared with a suitable market index. An alpha of 1% means the investment's return on investment over a selected period of time was 1% better than the market during that same period; a negative alpha means the investment underperformed the market. Alpha, along with beta, is one of two key coefficients in the capital asset pricing model used in modern portfolio theory and is closely related to other important quantities such as standard deviation, R-squared and the Sharpe ratio.

A "fund of funds" (FOF) is an investment strategy of holding a portfolio of other investment funds rather than investing directly in stocks, bonds or other securities. This type of investing is often referred to as multi-manager investment. A fund of funds may be "fettered", meaning that it invests only in funds managed by the same investment company, or "unfettered", meaning that it can invest in external funds run by other managers.

An investment strategy or portfolio is considered market-neutral if it seeks to avoid some form of market risk entirely, typically by hedging. To evaluate market-neutrality requires specifying the risk to avoid. For example, convertible arbitrage attempts to fully hedge fluctuations in the price of the underlying common stock.

The absolute return or simply return is a measure of the gain or loss on an investment portfolio expressed as a percentage of invested capital. The adjective "absolute" is used to stress the distinction with the relative return measures often used by long-only stock funds that are not allowed to take part in short selling.

Tactical asset allocation (TAA) is a dynamic investment strategy that actively adjusts a portfolio's asset allocation. The goal of a TAA strategy is to improve the risk-adjusted returns of passive management investing.

Alternative investment

An alternative investment is an investment in any asset class excluding stocks, bonds, and cash. The term is a relatively loose one and includes tangible assets such as precious metals, art, wine, antiques, coins, or stamps and some financial assets such as real estate, commodities, private equity, distressed securities, hedge funds, exchange funds, carbon credits, venture capital, film production, financial derivatives, and cryptocurrencies. Investments in real estate, forestry and shipping are also often termed "alternative" despite the ancient use of such real assets to enhance and preserve wealth. In the last century, fancy color diamonds have emerged as an alternative investment class as well. Alternative investments are to be contrasted with traditional investments.

A 130–30 fund or a ratio up to 150/50 is a type of collective investment vehicle, often a type of specialty mutual fund, but which allows the fund manager simultaneously to hold both long and short positions on different equities in the fund. Traditionally, mutual funds were long-only investments. 130–30 funds are a fast-growing segment of the financial industry; they should be available both as traditional mutual funds, and as exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While this type of investment has existed for a while in the hedge fund industry, its availability for retail investors is relatively new.

Risk parity is an approach to investment management which focuses on allocation of risk, usually defined as volatility, rather than allocation of capital. The risk parity approach asserts that when asset allocations are adjusted to the same risk level, the risk parity portfolio can achieve a higher Sharpe ratio and can be more resistant to market downturns than the traditional portfolio. Risk parity is vulnerable to significant shifts in correlation regimes, such as observed in Q1 2020, which led to the significant underperformance of risk-parity funds in the Covid19 sell-off.

Hedge fund replication is the collective name given to a number of different methods that attempt to replicate hedge fund returns. The hedge fund industry has boomed over recent years and various studies by investment banks as well as academic papers have shown that hedge funds may be nearing an alpha generating capacity constraint. This means hedge funds can no longer produce alpha in aggregate. Replication has been claimed to remove the illiquidity, transparency and fraud risk associated with direct investment in hedge funds. With the belief that the pursuit of alpha is a zero-sum game, more investors are looking to simply add "Hedge Fund Beta" to their portfolio. These early investors have been rewarded as the replicators outperformed their direct investment cousins in 2008 due to their greater liquidity and lower use of leverage.

Investment fund

An investment fund is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group such as reducing the risks of the investment by a significant percentage. These advantages include an ability to:

Lars Jaeger is a Swiss-German author, entrepreneur, financial theorist, and alternative investment manager. He writes on the history and philosophy of science and technology, and has in the past been an author on hedge funds, quantitative investing, and risk management. In his widely read blog as well as other media he frequently writes on issues concerning scientific developments, new technologies, and their meaning for society. In 2014, Jaeger published a universal history of science, and in September 2016 a book on the interplay of science and spirituality. His next book "Supermacht Wissenschaften" outlines scenarios of mankind's technological future. His latest book "The Second Quantum Revolution - From Entanglement to Quantum Computing and Other Super-Technologies" deals with the latest quantum technologies. His latest book "Mehr Zukunft wagen" is a confrontation with the impending technological upheavals that lead to what Jaeger calls “The Human Crisis”.

Returns-based style analysis is a statistical technique used in finance to deconstruct the returns of investment strategies using a variety of explanatory variables. The model results in a strategy's exposures to asset classes or other factors, interpreted as a measure of a fund or portfolio manager's style. While the model is most frequently used to show an equity mutual fund’s style with reference to common style axes, recent applications have extended the model’s utility to model more complex strategies, such as those employed by hedge funds. Returns based strategies that use factors such as momentum signals have been popular to the extent that industry analysts incorporate their use in their Buy/Sell recommendations.

References

  1. 1 2 Jaeger, Lars. "Factor Modeling and Benchmarking of Hedge Funds: Can Passive Investments in Hedge Fund Strategies Deliver?". SSRN   811185 .Missing or empty |url= (help)
  2. Gerald T. Lins, Thomas P. Lemke, Kathryn L. Hoenig & Patricia Schoor Rube, Hedge Funds and Other Private Funds: Regulation and Compliance §1:1 (2014 ed.).
  3. Stuart A. McCrary (2002). "Chapter 1: Introduction to Hedge Funds". How to Create and Manage a Hedge Fund: A Professional's Guide. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 7–8. ISBN   047122488X.
  4. The President's Working Group on Financial Markets (April 1999). "Hedge Funds, Leverage, and the Lessons of Long-Term Capital Management" (PDF). U.S. Department of the Treasury.
  5. Sharpe, William (1970). Portfolio Theory and Capital Markets. McGraw-Hill Trade. ISBN   978-0071353205.
  6. Markowitz, Harry (1958). Portfolio Selection. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   978-1557861085.