Chapter 3 - Asset Allocation and Investment Strategy - 8% Flashcards
What is an Asset Class?
An asset class is a specific category of assets or investments such as cash, stocks and bonds.
What is Asset Allocation?
It is the general term used to describe the process of determining the appropriate proportions for different asset classes in an investor’s portfolio and maintaining those proportions over time.
What are the 3 asset allocation strategies?
a) Strategic asset allocation (Passive/Policy/Benchmark): It becomes the benchmark against which the performance of the client’s portfolio can be measured.
b) Portfolio rebalancing (Dynamic Asset Allocation: refers to the systematic rebalancing, either temporarily or based on weights, needed to return the portfolio to the long-term benchmark asset class mix.
c) Tactical Asset Allocation: TAA strategy is a decision by the client and investment advisor to temporaily change the client’s SAA to take advantage of perceived opportunities created by short term fluctuations in the relative performance of asset classes.
What are the benefits that client’s derive from using an asset allocation strategy?
- Asset allocation accounts for most of the variation in a portfolio’s long-term returns;
- The SAA is designed to be an optimal investment portfolio;
- Asset allocation allows meaningful performance measurement;
- Long-term investment objectives are kept in focus;
- Tactical asset allocation allows for opportunities to realize enhanced returns through successful portfolio tilting.
Describe the steps in the establishment of the SAA?
- Establish client objectives and constraints;
- Specify asset classes eligible for the portfolio;
- Specify capital market expectations;
- Derive the efficient portfolio frontier;
- Find and set ehe optimal asset mix
What is Mean-Variance Analysis (in SAA)?
Mean-Variance Analysis relies heavily on the precepts of modern portfolio theory. Own smaller amounts of less-than-perfectly correlated assets instead of large amounts of a single asset.
It can determine an SAA in one of 2 ways -
- PURE MEAN-VARIANCE ANALYSIS: requires the IA to include info on capital market expectations and to estimate a numerical value for the client’s risk tolerance. Using this info, the pure optimizer, a quadratic formula that maximises investor utility, recommends a single strategic asset allocation that is both efficient and acceptable given the client’s risk tolerance.
- Other optimizers require only a set of capital market expectations as input.
What is Time Diversification Approach (in SAA)?
Time Diversification means that over the long term, the return/risk trade off for equities improves over that of all other asset classes, and therefore the longer the time horizon, the lower the risk of holding equities. A belief in TDA leads to a recommendation that younger clients hold a greater percentage of their portfolios in equities than older clients would because equities offer the greatest expected return.
What is Age Approach (in SAA)?
It recommends a specific SAA based solely on the client’s age. It suggests an allocation to debt securities (includ. cash and cash equivalents) equal to the client’s age. With this rule, the allocation to equities equals 100 minus the client’s age.
What are the basic assumptions of Dynamic Asset Allocation?
a) Capital market expectations remain constant.
b) Risk tolerance remains constant.
c) Investment objectives remain constant.
What are the advantages of rebalancing a portfolio?
a) The integrity of the asset mix is enforced.
b) Value may be added to performance with counter-cyclical selling and buying.
c) Discipline is enforced.
d) Portfolio risk is controlled.
What are the two most commonly employed rebalancing strategies for Dynamic rebalancing?
- Temporal Rebalancing: involves rebalancing a portfolio back to target weights periodically.It does not involve continuous monitoring within the rebalancing period.One drawback, is that the strategy calls for rebalancing regardless of market conditions.
- Weight-Based Rebalancing: involves setting rebalancing thresholds or trigger points that are a % of the portfolio’s value. Ex: if the target proportion for an asset class is 40% of portfolio value, 35% to 45% (which are the trigger points) is the corridor or tolerance band for the value of that asset class.
What are the two Tactical Asset Allocation strategies?
- Value-Based Tactical Asset Allocation: It means identifying times when an asset class is cheap or expensive by comparing the relative value of that class with the values of all other asset classes. They often uses an analysis of risk premiums - a) Stocks/T-bills risk premium: the expected return on equities minus the expected returns on T-bills; b) Bonds/T-bills risk premium: the expected return on bonds minus the expected returns on T-bills.; c) Stocks/bonds risk premium: The expected return on equities minus the expected return on bonds.
- Cyclical Tactical Asset Allocation: involves monitoring economic activity for patterns that have historically led to stock market movements. IAs can use these movements as guides in tilting portfolios away from their strategic asset allocation.
What are the risks of Tactical Asset Allocation?
- Modest or no value added
- Early calls
- Shifts in normal valuations: A TAA strategy that focuses on valuation models may not incorporate changes in equilibrium in a timely way, thereby increasing portfolio risk.
What is asset location?
Asset location refers to the decision to hold investment assets in taxable, tax-deferred and tax-exempt accounts to achieve the greatest after-tax return for a given risk tolerance.
- Debt securities which generate interest income, should always be held in a tax deferred account, such as RRSP or TFSA
- Equity securities which generate capital gains and dividends should be held in a taxable account.
What are Equity Investment Strategies?
Strategy is a function of what the manager or advisor believes about investment finance. Strategies can be active or passive, can be bottom up or top down, can focus on value or growth or on small or large capitalization stocks or employ sector rotation.
What is an Active Equity Strategy?
An active investment strategy uses expectations about individual securities and the overall investment environment to build a portfolio that will take advantage of those expectations. It is an attempt to outperform a benchmark portfolio on a risk-adjusted basis.
What is a Passive Equity Strategy?
A passive investment strategy does not lead to portfolio changes when expectations change. It is consistent with a return objective equal to the expected return on the benchmark portfolio.
What is Efficient Market Hypothesis? What are its three forms?
Efficient-market hypothesis states prices reflect available information in efficient markets. This theory has 3 forms, each of which assumes that a different amount if information is reflected in asset prices –
- Weak Form: Current prices incorporate all info about past prices, volumes and returns. This implies that technical analysis cannot consistently beat the market.
- Semi-strong Form: Current prices reflect all publicly available information. This implies that neither fundamental nor technical analysis can be used and will do nothing to help investors beat the market.
- Strong Form: Prices reflect all information, including insider information. This implies that no type of further analysis is helpful in beating the market.
What are the Passive Equity Strategies?
- Indexing: is the most popular form of passive investing. An indexed portfolio is designed to track the performance of a specific market index. It is supported by the belief in the strong form efficient-market hypothesis.
- Advantages: a) Low risk of under performing the benchmark; b) Fees that are usually lower than those associated with most active strategies; c) the fact that the strategy does not depend in the ability of the client or IA to select securities
- Disadvantages: a) Potential underperformance relative to active strategies; b) the risk that the portfolio does not meet portfolio objectives or constraints; c) lack of assurance that the performance of the index will be matched - Buy-and-hold Strategy: The IA or client select a group of securities or managed products and the client holds them until he or she needs to sell them to meet investment goals.
What are the Active Equity Strategies?
- Bottom-up Approach: begin with a focus on individual stocks. Investors or portfolio managers look at the characteristics of individual stocks and build portfolios of the best stocks in terms of forecast risk-return characteristics.
- Top-down Approach: begin with an analysis of macro factors. It begins with a study of broad macroeconomic factors before it narrows the analysis to individual stocks.
What are the types of Bottom-up Approaches?
- Style-based Approach: involve focusing on a particular set of stocks that have similar fundamental characteristics and performance patterns.
- Non-style based Approach: do not focus on a particular group of stocks but involve a search for stocks with the best chance of meeting particular objectives.
What is market capitalization?
This widely used equity style focuses on the size of the company as measured by equity market capitalization. The stocks with the smallest market capitalizations are called small-cap stocks and those with the largest market capitalizations are called large cap stocks.
What bottom-up, non-style-based approach attempts to measure the intrinsic value of a stock by closely examining the company’s financials and operations?
a) Pure technical
b) Pure qualitative
c) Pure fundamental
d) Pure qualitative
The pure fundamental approach involves an analysis of the company’s historical and projected financial performance and valuation. This usually involves an in-depth look at the company’s financial statements, with a focus on earnings growth and cash flow, as well as the quality of the company’s management. The decision to buy or sell a stock is often made on the basis of an estimate of the stock’s true value compared to the stock’s market price.
Which statement(s) is/are true regarding tactical asset allocation? I. Tactical asset allocation assumes constant risk tolerance. II. Changes in risk tolerance lead to changes in tactical asset allocation III. Tactical asset allocation is either value-based or momentum-based
I only. TAA is an active management strategy employed to add value by temporarily departing from the long-term policy asset mix. It operates independently from risk tolerance - a change in risk tolerance could give rise to a change in strategic asset allocation, but TAA assumes constant risk tolerance. TAA strategies are either value-based or cyclical.