Reducing Downside Risk of Trend Following Strategies

How can investors suppress the downside of trend following strategies? In their July 2019 paper entitled “Protecting the Downside of Trend When It Is Not Your Friend”, flagged by a subscriber, Kun Yan, Edward Qian and Bryan Belton test ways to reduce downside risk of simple trend following strategies without upside sacrifice. To do so, they: (1) add an entry/exit breakout rule to a past return signal to filter out assets that are not clearly trending; and, (2) apply risk parity weights to assets, accounting for both their volatilities and correlations of their different trends. Specifically, they each month:

• Enter a long (short) position in an asset only if the sign of its past 12-month return is positive (negative), and the latest price is above (below) its recent n-day minimum (maximum). Baseline value for n is 200.
• Exit a long (short) position in an asset only if the latest price trades below (above) its recent n/2-day minimum (maximum), or the 12-month past return goes negative (positive).
• Assign weights to assets that equalize respective risk contributions to the portfolio based on both asset volatility and correlation structure, wherein covariances among assets adapt to whether an asset is trending up or down. They calculate covariances based on monthly returns from an expanding (inception-to-date) window with baseline 2-year half-life exponential decay.
• Impose a 10% annual portfolio volatility target.

Their benchmark is a simpler strategy that uses only past 12-month return for trend signals and inverse volatility weighting with annual volatility target 40% for each asset. Their asset universe consists of 66 futures/forwards. They roll futures to next nearest contracts on the first day of the expiration month. They calculate returns to currency forwards using spot exchange rates adjusted for carry. Using daily prices for 23 commodity futures, 13 equity index futures, 11 government bond futures and 19 developed and emerging markets currency forwards as available during August 1959 through December 2017, they find that: (more…)