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Journal Article

Fact, Fiction, and Factor Investing: Practical Applications

This piece distills the central concepts and practical takeaways of our Fact, Fiction, and Factor Investing article, which examined many claims about factor investing, referencing an extensive academic literature and performing simple, yet powerful, analysis to address those claims.

Journal Article

ESG Ratings: A Compass without Direction

We examine the recent concerns about the reliability of the assessments of ESG ratings providers. We review the demand for ESG information, the stated objectives of ESG ratings providers, how ratings are determined, the evidence of what they achieve, and structural aspects of the industry that potentially influence ratings. We find that while ESG ratings providers may convey important insights into the nonfinancial impact of companies, significant shortcomings exist in their objectives, methodologies, and incentives which detract from the informativeness of their assessments.

Perspective

Everything and More

My colleague and former classmate Antti Ilmanen is at it again with his second book, Investing Amid Low Expected Returns. Very rarely does a sequel stand up to the original (see Jaws II), but that's certainly not the case here!

White Paper

When Stock-Bond Diversification Fails

The events of 2020 to 2021 have increased uncertainty around the future path of inflation. We review how different inflationary outcomes can impact investor portfolios and evaluate what assets and strategies may enhance portfolio resilience to inflation.

Journal Article

Sustainable Systematic Credit

Interest in sustainable investing is now expanding into fixed income. This paper assesses how measures of sustainability/ESG might be relevant for corporate bonds and analyzes how ESG measures can be incorporated into an investment process to achieve the joint object of maximizing risk-adjusted returns and a sustainability target.

Working Paper

Climate Finance

The paper reviews the literature studying interactions between climate change and financial markets, including various approaches to incorporating climate risk in macro-finance models as well as the empirical literature that explores the pricing of climate risks across several asset classes.

Journal Article

Tail Risk Hedging: Contrasting Put and Trend Strategies

The sharp market fall and speedy recovery during the eventful first half of 2020 has kept tail risk hedging topical: investors have both fresh memories of a painful loss and renewed fears of a repeat. We try to offer a balanced overview of the strengths and weaknesses of direct and indirect tail hedging strategies.

Journal Article

Portfolio Protection? It’s a Long (Term) Story…

Investors have a natural urge to protect their portfolios from sudden crashes, even though bad outcomes that unfold over longer periods are more detrimental to reaching long-term goals. We show risk-mitigating and diversifying strategies have added value more consistently than options-based hedging over the more important, longer drawdowns.

Journal Article

Enhanced Portfolio Optimization

We show how to identify the portfolios that cause problems in standard mean-variance optimization (MVO) and develop an enhanced portfolio optimization (EPO) method that addresses the problems. Applying EPO on several realistic datasets, we find significant gains relative to standard benchmarks.

Perspective

The Illiquidity Discount?

Conventional wisdom is you get an expected return premium for bearing illiquidity. But what if this is backwards? What if investors will actually pay a higher price and accept a lower expected return for very illiquid assets?