A long-only investable minimum variance strategy outperformed the S&P 500 over the four decades from January 1973 to December 2012. Through the lens of a factor model, we show this outperformance can be largely attributed to implicit style bets. Specifically, minimum variance has thrived by...

The distinctive financial goals and constraints of ultra-high net worth individuals together with their aggregate growth in assets have led to the emergence of “New Institutional” investing, which includes the best practices from institutional investors but incorporates the critical element...

We examine the tax efficiency of an indexing strategy and six factor tilts. Between June 1995 and March 2018, average value added by tax management exceeded 1.4% per year at a 10- year horizon for all the strategies we considered. Tax-managed factor tilts that are beta 1 to the market generated...

We use supervised learning to identify factors that predict the cross-section of returns and maximum drawdown for stocks in the US equity market. Our data run from January 1970 to December 2019 and our analysis includes ordinary least squares, penalized linear regressions, tree-based models, and...

Maximum drawdown, the largest cumulative loss from peak to trough, is one of the most widely used indicators of risk in the fund management industry, but one of the least developed in the context of measures of risk. We formalize drawdown risk as Conditional Expected Drawdown (CED), which is the...

The cumulative return to a levered strategy is determined by five elements that fit together in a simple, useful formula. A previously undocumented element is the covariance between leverage and excess return to the fully invested source portfolio underlying the strategy. In an empirical study...

An extended history of market returns reveals aspects of financial risk that are not evident over short timescales. The most enduring risk measure is variance, which quantifies short-term regularities in return dispersion. An alternative measure, shortfall, quantifies the risk of extreme market...

We look at an enhanced loss-harvesting strategy, tax-rate arbitrage, which exploits the differential between short- and long-term tax rates. Our study relies on ATBAT, an After-Tax Back-Testing Analysis Tool that lets us examine tax-managed strategies over numerous historical periods. For the...

We evaluate several long/short strategies for managing a portfolio of default swaps. The strategies are based on a ranking of credits by residuals, which are the differences between market spreads and spreads generated by the iSpread structural model. Investment grade portfolios for the U.S. and...