Risk Premium Allocation Tail Diversification

Do exposures to long-short factor (alternative risk) premiums (ARP) protect portfolios from stock and bond market crashes? In their February 2019 paper entitled “A Framework for Risk Premia Investing: Anywhere to Hide?”, Kari Vatanen and Antti Suhonen examine weekly correlations of 28 ARP composite returns with those of stocks (MSCI World Equity Market Index), bonds (Barclays Global Treasury Index) and commodities (Bloomberg Commodity Index), overall and during crashes, over an 11-year sample period. They form each ARP composite using both backtested and live data for at least three related strategies from different investment banks, weighted by inverse full-sample volatility and rebalanced weekly. They focus on ARP composite performances when stocks and bonds are weak. Based on findings, they then designate ARP composites as:

• Offensive (benefiting from high economic growth but suffering from low growth and economic turbulence) or defensive (diversifying risks of offensive strategies).
• Fundamental (based on investor risk aversion), behavioral (based on typical investor behavior) or structural (based on seasonal asset flows or on market inefficiencies and liquidity imbalances).

Using daily data as specified for long-short alternative risk premium strategies from seven global investment banks during January 2007 to the beginning of May 2018, they find that:

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