Another year has passed, and with it, investors booked double-digit gains on their U.S. equity positions, marking the eighth consecutive year of positive returns for the Russell 1000 Index. Further, equities have continued their upward march thus far in 2017, on hopes that our new president will be able to effect positive change relating to corporate taxes and overly burdensome regulations, among other things. With equities again in the limelight, investors could be forgiven for questioning the role of alternative strategies. But it is exactly at these moments when investors must give careful consideration to the various tools that can be employed in a diversified portfolio.
In the following table, we present various risk, return and beta measures associated with all the major hedge fund strategies, many of which are now available in mutual fund form. The window of time selected was based on the longest common time frame for these indexes, and includes multiple market cycles.
Note that while each strategy has a fairly unique signature, there are undeniable commonalities. This is a function of the fact that there are only four broad asset classes: equities, bonds, commodities and currencies. No matter how you invest in these asset classes — through long-only or long/short strategies, directly or via derivative exposure — you will have exposure to common risk factors. The benefit of using alternative strategies is that they allow you to better dial in the specific exposures that you want to either magnify or minimize.
Long-only equity is the workhorse of most portfolios and has been quite effective over time, but it is a blunt instrument. When it is working well, that blunt instrument appears to be the only tool that investors need. However, as we are all painfully aware given the two major bear markets since 2000, there are times when that blunt instrument fails spectacularly.
