Alternatives may not be as exotic as most investors believe.
The sophisticated asset-pricing models we have today allow us to determine the underlying sources of returns to investments. Specifically, they permit us to identify the factors to which an investment has exposure.
However, a problem arises when employing current asset-pricing models to consider alternative, illiquid investments. The volatility of such assets is often understated.
This occurs because the data is often “smoothed” due to the lack of available daily pricing information. As a result, we can observe a serial correlation—the correlation of a variable with itself over successive time intervals—of returns that makes prices appear to be less volatile than they really are. The apparently “free lunch” provided through the diversification benefit, plus the lower volatility, tends to lead to an overallocation of such assets.
Key Research
Niels Pedersen, Sebastien Page and Fei He—authors of the study “Asset Allocation: Risk Models for Alternative Investments,” which appears in the May/June issue of the Financial Analysts Journal—attempted to solve the problem of understated volatility.
Using economic intuition and econometric techniques, they estimated the exposure of various alternative investments (such as private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, private real estate, infrastructure, farmland and timberland) to well-known risk factors that have been found to explain almost all of the differences in returns of diversified portfolios.
The risk factors they used included beta, size, value, liquidity, momentum, real interest rate duration, credit risk, industry exposure, leverage and the carry trade.
The Usual Suspects
The authors concluded risk-factor analysis reveals that alternative investments actually have exposure to the same factors that explain the returns and volatility of publicly available stocks and bonds.
They write: “Returns on alternative assets depend on changes in interest rates, as well as how investors view risky cash flows, as reflected in equity market valuations and credit spreads… Liquidity and other specialized factors also play a role… The risk factor-based approach generally generates higher correlations between alternative investments and their public counterparts, especially when their equity beta is high.”
The authors found that when their model was applied to portfolio construction, the allocation to alternative investments was reduced.