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Today’s post is our third visit in 2021 to the topic of whether the traditional 60-40 stocks/bonds portfolio still makes sense.

Recap

Here’s what we covered in the first two articles:

1. Stocks are riskier (more volatile in price) than bonds but have higher long-term returns.
2. The logic of blending two assets together comes from the idea that their prices will move in different directions.
   • When stocks go down, you hope that bonds will move up in price.
3. The riskiest portfolio recommended by financial advisors to customers with differing levels of risk appetite would be 80-20 stocks/bonds – and the safest would be 40-60
   • So the 60-40 portfolio can be thought of as the middle option of three.
4. In fact, bonds are a pretty bad hedge for stocks in any case, unless you either hold a lot of them (bad for overall returns) or use a lot of leverage (risky).
   • But the 60:40 portfolio is easy to understand and has proved pretty easy to market to investors.
   • It’s also done pretty well over the decades, so many investors would miss it.

The impact of inflation

1. The need to rethink 60-40 all starts with the prospect of higher inflation and its potential impact on the bond-equity relationship.
   • If inflation rises for an extended period, this could be bad for both stocks and bonds.
   • In quant speak, the bond-equity correlation might turn positive.
2. This is actually the normal relationship, but in recent years, investors have become used to bonds rising when stocks fall.
   • In particular, recession-driven stock market crashes lead to a demand for safe-haven assets, which are traditionally government bonds.
   • So the price goes up, and the yield goes down.
   • When the economy recovers, so do stocks, but bond prices fall back.
3. But as bond yields approach zero during the good times, they don’t have far to fall in a crash.
   • And so they have a limited ability to protect you.
4. And with bond yields close to rates on savings accounts, there’s little incentive for private investors to hold bonds at all.

Alternative assets

The simplest fix is to replace bonds with alternative assets:

1. The obvious candidates are gold and cash, or perhaps index-linked bonds
2. More adventurous investors might consider:
   • other precious metals and commodities in general
   • private equity and venture capital
   • hedge funds (global macro and long/short equity)
   • infrastructure funds and royalty companies
   • and even a small allocation to crypto (particularly in combination with gold)
3. Even more esoteric alternatives include:
   • managed futures/trend-following (or CTA funds in the US)
   • multi-factor market-neutral funds (providing exposure to value, size, DB pensions, which act as a bond portfolio without you choosing to own bonds.

Previous posts

In the previous two posts, we looked at five articles on this topic. Interesting points included:

1. Bond returns are driven by the coupon (yield) – these are currently low
2. Stock returns are inversely related to starting valuations (eg. PEs), which are currently high
3. The projected return on 60:40 is now just 3.5% pa
4. More esoteric bonds offer higher yields, but also higher correlations with equities
5. Factor premia (smart-beta funds) are another asset class to look at
   • Patience and diversification are required since no single factor works all the time and many factors underperform for years (eg. value right now).
6. So are hedge funds (particularly long-short equity, which is not readily available to DIY investors, and global macro, which is), options and managed futures (trend-following).
   • The last two are very much DIY pursuits.
7. Stocks prefer falling inflation to rising inflation
8. Bonds can be diversifying even with (modest) rising inflation, but as their yields rise, they will lower portfolio returns, so the portfolio is not protected
9. Index-linked bonds are less diversifying but will impact returns less
10. Commodities and gold have close to zero correlation, but correlations are slightly positive when inflation is rising – they also have good returns, particularly in rising inflation
11. More diversified portfolios are more stable under inflation.
12. Real estate, PE and infrastructure are not true diversifiers – they depend on positive economic growth (like stocks).
    • The diversification effects they show on paper are flattered by smoothed and lagged valuations.
13. Managed futures and long vol generate similar returns to bonds (with higher volatility)
    • Multi-factor market-neutral generates a lower return than bonds with lower volatility.
14. Managed futures and multi-factor have zero correlation with stocks
    • Long vol has a negative correlation
15. Replacing bonds in a 60/40 with long vol works well – the new portfolio has a higher return, lower volatility and lower maximum drawdown.
    • Replacing bonds with long vol, trend and multi-factor also beats the traditional 60/40, though only by a little.

Rethinking 60-40 – Part 3

The threat from inflation is a hot topic at the moment, and only a month after the second post, I already have another five articles to cover.

Disciplined Systematic Global Macro Views

Three of them come from systematic investor Mark Rzepczynski on his blog DSGMV.

Using any number of strategies would have done well. Whether

Nevertheless, the quick pandemic recession coupled with excess money has already created a huge boom for commodities. Whether this will continue is less clear, but the last year has generated explosive commodity upside but may still allow for further price gains. 

Thinking longer-term, Mark uses both the 5-year moving average (which has now been breached and is itself moving higher) and production/replacement costs relative to demand.

As prices fall, marginal production is cut and there is the potential for supply and demand imbalances. Low prices solve the problem of low prices – and markets will mean-revert.

Prices are cheap, but there is room for upside and the highs of 2014 have yet to be reached. In an inflationary world, commodities are still a good location for capital.

Mark also believes that momentum and value will help.

Simple value and Man Group

The FT’s Alphaville column featured a guest post from Man Group on how to defend against inflation.

Our research draws on 34 inflation episodes in the US, UK and Japan (using nearly a century of data). The piece also analyses eight US price-level surges over the past 95 years where inflation started from a moderate level and shot past 5 per cent

The latter being the situation we now possibly face. Things are not good for stocks:

The S&P equity market index is likely to get hammered during inflation surges, losing on average 7 per cent in annualised real terms.

Like everyone else, Man is backing commodities instead:

Commodities have proved a solid historical hedge due. The energy complex has on average returned 41 per cent while industrial commodities have returned 19 per cent – both on a real basis. Gold and silver have also offered low double-digit returns.

Inflation-linked securities also hedge, but given negative starting yields, you need to be prepared to tolerate negative real returns in the absence of inflation – most people would rather not.

Time-series Adventurous Investor

David Stevenson was a little more sanguine about inflation, quoting a Brown Advisory study that shows that stocks and even bonds do okay until inflation gets above 5% pa.

Two other variables matter. Markets don’t like inflation surprises (when rates go up more than expected) and markets also keep a watchful eye on what are called sticky prices (where prices don’t ebb and flow with the business cycle).

Brown favours value and quality as a defence, prioritising stocks that have pricing power.

Conclusions

That’s it for today – the message is the same as last time:

• There’s no “silver bullet” asset that you can replace your bonds with.

But there are plenty of options that you can use together to achieve the same effect.

• Which ones you feel comfortable using is down to you.

I’m a diversification maximalist, so I’ll be using everything that I can get my hands on:

1. Cash
2. Gold and other precious metals
3. Commodities in general
4. Private equity and venture capital
5. Hedge funds (global macro and long/short equity)
6. Infrastructure funds and royalty companies
7. Trend-following
8. Multi-factor investing (particularly DB pensions

On the maybe/how to list I have:

• Long vol
• Index-linked bonds (if they start to go up in price)
• Crypto
• Art
• Farmland

Until next time.

Mike Rawson

Mike is the owner of 7 Circles, and a private investor living in London. He has been managing his own money for 35 years, with some success.

Article credit to: https://the7circles.uk/rethinking-60-40-part-3/