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Calling all due diligence wonks. Get your coffee, your spreadsheets, your performance databases and dig in. Your role has never been more important. Investment manager due diligence has always been a critical, if not
underappreciated, value add in the advisor-client partnership. The advisors evaluating strategies are the sole guardians between millions of clients and thousands of managers marketing to them. It's never been an easy task, but it's absolutely critical in the current market environment, especially for alternative strategies. The reason: Performance dispersion in the alternatives category has widened considerably.
For both long/short equity and managed futures funds, two of the more common alternatives strategies, performance dispersion in 2020 has been considerably wider than any of the previous five calendar years. (For the purpose of this research, we measured performance dispersion as the performance difference between strategies in the fifth and 95th percentile of Morningstar's category for long/short equity and managed futures funds.)
Looking further back, dispersion for the long/short equity category in 2020 was 47.7%, compared to an average of 27.8% since the financial crisis through 2019. For managed futures, dispersion was 27.3% in 2020, compared to an average of 17.4% for the full period since the crisis through 2019.
Wider performance dispersion means a similarly wider range of outcomes. Poor outcomes in the alternatives space are troublesome, because the ramifications are usually larger than if a client is invested in an under-performing stock or bond fund.
Pick a poor stock fund, for example, and the advisor and client will eventually switch to a different stock fund. The asset allocation remains the same, however. But pick a poor-performing alternatives fund and a client might completely retrench from strategies they already are less familiar with in the first place.
Whatever objective the advisor hoped to achieve with alternatives, whether it's outperformance or diversification, is now lost, and inevitably, the client's switch away from alternatives probably will come at the wrong time.
