The market downturn and ensuing volatility in the third quarter of 2015 is a timely reminder about the benefits of diversifying your portfolio with investment strategies that are expected to exhibit little-to-no correlation with the broad equity and bond markets.
Moreover, as the US enters the late innings of its current economic growth cycle, many professional and individual investors are expecting lower returns from equities going forward than they’ve enjoyed over the last few years. These lowered expectations are on top of concern about what will happen to investors’ bond holdings when today’s historically low interest rates eventually rise.
The Invesco Quantitative Strategies team believes one potential way to buffer the effects of market downturns, volatility and rising interest rates is to add market neutral equity strategies to traditional portfolios, as they potentially offer a unique approach to generating return regardless of the general movements of the equity and bond markets.
In this blog, I outline four of the top reasons to consider market neutral equity strategies:
1. They have very low levels of correlation to other asset classes
One of the ways investors attempt to manage and mitigate risk is by combining strategies that differ within and across asset classes to help diversify their return pattern over time. Using this approach, investors’ wealth creation is not tied to the fortunes of just one or a few investment options. Since market neutral strategies typically seek to eliminate exposure to the broader market, these strategies have also delivered attractively low levels of correlation, not only to the equity markets, but to other broad asset classes as well.