Category: Hedge Funds

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Quant Strategies in 2018

Quant Strategies – Performance Summary Sept. 2018

The end of Q3 seems like an appropriate time for an across-the-piste review of how systematic strategies are performing in 2018.  I’m using the dozen or more strategies running on the Systematic Algotrading Platform as the basis for the performance review, although results will obviously vary according to the specifics of the strategy.  All of the strategies are traded live and performance results are net of subscription fees, as well as slippage and brokerage commissions.

Volatility Strategies

Those waiting for the hammer to fall on option premium collecting strategies will have been disappointed with the way things have turned out so far in 2018.  Yes, February saw a long-awaited and rather spectacular explosion in volatility which completely destroyed several major volatility funds, including the VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term ETN (XIV) as well as Chicago-based hedged fund LJM Partners (“our goal is to preserve as much capital as possible”), that got caught on the wrong side of the popular VIX carry trade.  But the lack of follow-through has given many volatility strategies time to recover. Indeed, some are positively thriving now that elevated levels in the VIX have finally lifted option premiums from the bargain basement levels they were languishing at prior to February’s carnage.  The Option Trader strategy is a stand-out in this regard:  not only did the strategy produce exceptional returns during the February melt-down (+27.1%), the strategy has continued to outperform as the year has progressed and YTD returns now total a little over 69%.  Nor is the strategy itself exceptionally volatility: the Sharpe ratio has remained consistently above 2 over several years.

Hedged Volatility Trading

Investors’ chief concern with strategies that rely on collecting option premiums is that eventually they may blow up.  For those looking for a more nuanced approach to managing tail risk the Hedged Volatility strategy may be the way to go.  Like many strategies in the volatility space the strategy looks to generate alpha by trading VIX ETF products;  but unlike the great majority of competitor offerings, this strategy also uses ETF options to hedge tail risk exposure.  While hedging costs certainly acts as a performance drag, the results over the last few years have been compelling:  a CAGR of 52% with a Sharpe Ratio close to 2.

F/X Strategies

One of the common concerns for investors is how to diversify their investment portfolios, especially since the great majority of assets (and strategies) tend to exhibit significant positive correlation to equity indices these days. One of the characteristics we most appreciate about F/X strategies in general and the F/X Momentum strategy in particular is that its correlation to the equity markets over the last several years has been negligible.    Other attractive features of the strategy include the exceptionally high win rate – over 90% – and the profit factor of 5.4, which makes life very comfortable for investors.  After a moderate performance in 2017, the strategy has rebounded this year and is up 56% YTD, with a CAGR of 64.5% and Sharpe Ratio of 1.89.

Equity Long/Short

Thanks to the Fed’s accommodative stance, equity markets have been generally benign over the last decade to the benefit of most equity long-only and long-short strategies, including our equity long/short Turtle Trader strategy , which is up 31% YTD.  This follows a spectacular 2017 (+66%) , and is in line with the 5-year CAGR of 39%.   Notably, the correlation with the benchmark S&P500 Index is relatively low (0.16), while the Sharpe Ratio is a respectable 1.47.

Equity ETFs – Market Timing/Swing Trading

One alternative to the traditional equity long/short products is the Tech Momentum strategy.  This is a swing trading strategy that exploits short term momentum signals to trade the ProShares UltraPro QQQ (TQQQ) and ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ (SQQQ) leveraged ETFs.  The strategy is enjoying a banner year, up 57% YTD, with a four-year CAGR of 47.7% and Sharpe Ratio of 1.77.  A standout feature of this equity strategy is its almost zero correlation with the S&P 500 Index.  It is worth noting that this strategy also performed very well during the market decline in Feb, recording a gain of over 11% for the month.

Futures Strategies

It’s a little early to assess the performance of the various futures strategies in the Systematic Strategies portfolio, which were launched on the platform only a few months ago (despite being traded live for far longer).    For what it is worth, both of the S&P 500 E-Mini strategies, the Daytrader and the Swing Trader, are now firmly in positive territory for 2018.   Obviously we are keeping a watchful eye to see if the performance going forward remains in line with past results, but our experience of trading these strategies gives us cause for optimism.

Conclusion:  Quant Strategies in 2018

There appear to be ample opportunities for investors in the quant sector across a wide range of asset classes.  For investors with equity market exposure, we particularly like strategies with low market correlation that offer significant diversification benefits, such as the F/X Momentum and F/X Momentum strategies.  For those investors seeking the highest risk adjusted return, option selling strategies like the Option Trader strategy are the best choice, while for more cautious investors concerned about tail risk the Hedged Volatility strategy offers the security of downside protection.  Finally, there are several new strategies in equities and futures coming down the pike, several of which are already showing considerable promise.  We will review the performance of these newer strategies at the end of the year.

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What Wealth Managers and Family Offices Need to Understand About Alternative Investing

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The most recent Morningstar survey provides an interesting snapshot of the state of the alternatives market.  In 2013, for the third successive year, liquid alternatives was the fastest growing category of mutual funds, drawing in flows totaling $95.6 billion.  The fastest growing subcategories have been long-short stock funds (growing more than 80% in 2013), nontraditional bond funds (79%) and “multi-alternative” fund-of-alts-funds products (57%).

Benchmarking Alternatives
The survey also provides some interesting insights into the misconceptions about alternative investments that remain prevalent amongst advisors, despite contrary indications provided by long-standing academic research.  According to Morningstar, a significant proportion of advisors continue to use inappropriate benchmarks, such as the S&P 500 or Russell 2000, to evaluate alternatives funds (see Some advisers using ill-suited benchmarks to measure alts performance by Trevor Hunnicutt, Investment News July 2014).  As Investment News points out, the problem with applying standards developed to measure the performance of funds that are designed to beat market benchmarks is that many alternative funds are intended to achieve other investment goals, such as reducing volatility or correlation.  These funds will typically have under-performed standard equity indices during the bull market, causing investors to jettison them from their portfolios at a time when the additional protection they offer may be most needed.

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This is but one example in a broader spectrum of issues about alternative investing that are poorly understood.  Even where advisors recognize the need for a more appropriate hedge fund index to benchmark fund performance, several traps remain for the unwary.  As shown in Brooks and Kat (The Statistical Properties of Hedge Fund Index Returns and Their Implications for Investors, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2001), there can be considerable heterogeneity between indices that aim to benchmark the same type of strategy, since indices tend to cover different parts of the alternatives universe.  There are also significant differences between indices in terms of their survivorship bias – the tendency to overstate returns by ignoring poorly performing funds that have closed down (see Welcome to the Dark Side – Hedge Fund Attribution and Survivorship Bias, Amin and Kat, Working Paper, 2002).  Hence, even amongst more savvy advisors, the perception of performance tends to be biased by the choice of index.

Risks and Benefits of Diversifying with Alternatives
An important and surprising discovery in relation to diversification with alternatives was revealed in Amin and Kat’s Diversification and Yield Enhancement with Hedge Funds (Working Paper, 2002).  Their study showed that the median standard deviation of a portfolio of stocks, bonds and hedge funds reached its lowest point where the allocation to alternatives was 50%, far higher than the 1%-5% typically recommended by advisors.

Standard Deviation of Portfolios of Stocks, Bonds and 20 hedge Funds

Hedge Fund Pct Mix and Volatility

Source: Diversification and Yield Enhancement with Hedge Funds, Amin and Kat, Working Paper, 2002

Another potential problem is that investors will not actually invest in the fund index that is used for benchmarking, but in a basket containing a much smaller number of funds, often through a fund of funds vehicle.  The discrepancy in performance between benchmark and basket can often be substantial in the alternatives space.

Amin and Kat studied this problem in 2002 (Portfolios of Hedge Funds, Working Paper, 2002), by constructing hedge fund portfolios ranging in size from 1 to 20 funds and measuring their performance on a number of criteria that included, not just the average return and standard deviation, but also the skewness (a measure of the asymmetry of returns), kurtosis (a measure of the probability of extreme returns)and the correlation with the S&P 500 Index and the Salomon (now Citigroup) Government Bond Index.  Their startling conclusion was that, in the alternatives space, diversification is not necessarily a good thing.    As expected, as the number of funds in the basket is increased, the overall volatility drops substantially; but at the same time skewness drops and kurtosis and market correlation increase significantly.  In other words, when adding more funds, the likelihood of a large loss increases and the diversification benefit declines.   The researchers found that a good approximation to a typical hedge fund index could be constructed with a basket of just 15 well-chosen funds, in most cases.

Concerns about return distribution characteristics such as skewness and kurtosis may appear arcane, but these factors often become crucially important at just the wrong time, from the investor’s perspective.  When things go wrong in the stock market they also tend to go wrong for hedge funds, as a fall in stock prices is typically accompanied by a drop in market liquidity, a widening of spreads and, often, an increase in stock loan costs.  Equity market neutral and long/short funds that are typically long smaller cap stocks and short larger cap stocks will pay a higher price for the liquidity they need to maintain neutrality.  Likewise, a market sell-off is likely to lead to postponing of M&A transactions that will have a negative impact on the performance of risk arbitrage funds.  Nor are equity-related funds the only alternatives likely to suffer during a market sell-off.  A market fall will typically be accompanied by widening credit spreads, which in turn will damage the performance of fixed income and convertible arbitrage funds.   The key point is that, because they all share this risk, diversification among different funds will not do much to mitigate it.

Conclusions
Many advisors remain wedded to using traditional equity indices that are inappropriate benchmarks for alternative strategies.  Even where more relevant indices are selected, they may suffer from survivorship and fund-selection bias.

In order to reap the diversification benefit from alternatives, research shows that investors should concentrate a significant proportion of their wealth in the limited number of alternatives funds, a portfolio strategy that is diametrically opposed to the “common sense” approach of many advisors.

Finally, advisors often overlook the latent correlation and liquidity risks inherent in alternatives that come into play during market down-turns, at precisely the time when investors are most dependent on diversification to mitigate market risk.  Such risks can be managed, but only by paying attention to portfolio characteristics such as skewness and kurtosis, which alternative funds significantly impact.