Downside Risk Premiums

Does focusing on downside risk (volatility or beta) consistently produce more accurate forecasts of asset returns? In their July 2018 paper entitled “Tail Risk in the Cross Section of Alternative Risk Premium Strategies”, Bernd Scherer and Nick Baltas investigate how well downside risk explains cross-sectional returns of 260 risk factor strategies spanning asset classes and investment styles from six global investment banks. Their main model is a two-pass regression that distinguishes between conventional market beta and market downside beta. For corroboration, they consider four other indicators of downside risk (return skewness, correlation of tail returns with equity market returns, TED spread and economic policy uncertainty as measured by relative VIX level). Using weekly data risk factor returns and downside risk indicators during February 2008 through January 2018, they find that: (more…)