Summary Investors nearing retirement and others wary of current market conditions can use the hedged portfolio method to get a higher return than cash. We explain the method, and present a sample hedged portfolio for an investor unwilling to risk more than a 4% drawdown over the next six months. This sample hedged portfolio has a negative hedging cost and an expected return 20 times that of the average jumbo money market yield. Searching For A Safe Harbor In A Stormy Market After the turbulence of the last week, some investors expected Monday’s calmness to continue on Tuesday, but, as Seeking Alpha news editor Carl Surran reported , that wasn’t the case (“Stock sell-off, turbulence return with a vengeance”): Investors had hoped last week’s volatility had passed after calmer sessions on Friday and Monday, but the turbulence returned today, showing ” we’re not out of the woods by any means ,” said Meridian Equity Partners’ Jonathan Corpina. Surran went on to note that the major indexes all ended the session in correction territory, with the Dow off 12% from its high in May. While corrections can offer opportunities for more aggressive investors, some investors have less tolerance for risk. In this post, we’ll look at an approach that can offer a safe harbor for the next several months for risk-averse investors. Dealing With Uncertainty One way to deal with the uncertainty exemplified by the last several market sessions is to invest in a handful of securities you think will do well, and hedge against the possibility that you end up being wrong. That approach is systematized in the hedged portfolio method, which we detailed in a previous post (“Backtesting The Hedged Portfolio Method”). One advantage of the hedged portfolio method is that it can accommodate a broad range of risk tolerances. If you can tolerate a drawdown of more than 20%, our research (summarized in the previous post we mentioned above) suggests you can achieve returns as good or better than the market over time with less risk. But a similar approach can also be used for investors who can only tolerate smaller drawdowns. Below, we’ll recap how you can build a hedged portfolio yourself (or for a client), and present an example of a hedged portfolio created for an investor with $1,000,000 to invest who can’t tolerate a drawdown of more than 4%. Risk Tolerance, Hedging Cost, And Potential Return All else equal, with a hedged portfolio, the greater an investor’s risk tolerance – the greater the maximum drawdown he is willing to risk (his “threshold”) – the higher his expected return will be. In a previous post (“Keeping A Small Nest Egg From Cracking”), we created a hedged portfolio for a small investor who could tolerate a drawdown of as much as 20%. In this case, with an investor who can only tolerate a 4% drawdown, we would expect a lower return. Constructing A Hedged Portfolio The process, in broad strokes, is this: Find securities with high potential returns (we define potential return as a high-end, bullish estimate of how the security will perform). Find securities that are relatively inexpensive to hedge. Buy a handful of securities that score well on the first two criteria; in other words, buy a handful of securities with high potential returns net of their hedging costs (or, ones with high net potential returns). Note that when creating a hedged portfolio for an extremely risk-averse investor, such as in this case, the second criteria (“inexpensive to hedge”) will outweigh the first (“high potential returns”) because it may not be possible to hedge the securities with the highest potential returns against such small declines. Hedge them. The potential benefits of this approach are twofold: If you are successful at the first step (finding securities with high potential returns), and you hold a concentrated portfolio of them, your portfolios should generate decent returns over time. If you are hedged, and your return estimates are completely wrong, on occasion – or the market moves against you – your downside will be strictly limited. How To Implement This Approach Finding securities with positive potential returns For this, you can use Seeking Alpha Pro , among other sources. Seeking Alpha articles often include price targets for long ideas, and you can convert these to percentage returns from current prices. But you’ll need to use the same time frame for each of your expected return calculations to facilitate comparisons of expected returns, hedging costs, and net expected returns. Our method starts with calculations of six-month potential returns. Finding Securities That Are Relatively Inexpensive To Hedge For this step, you’ll need to find hedges for the securities with positive potential returns, and then calculate the hedging cost as a percentage of position value for each security. Whatever hedging method you use, for this example, you’d want to make sure that each security is hedged against a greater-than-4% decline over the time frame covered by your potential return calculations. Our method attempts to find optimal static hedges using collars as well as protective puts. Buying Securities That Score Well On The First Two Criteria To determine which securities these are, you may need to first adjust your potential return calculations by the time frame of your hedges. For example, although our method initially calculates six-month potential returns and aims to find hedges with six months to expiration, in some cases the closest hedge expiration may be five months out. In those cases, we will adjust our potential return calculation down accordingly, because we expect an investor will exit the position shortly before the hedge expires (in general, our method and calculations are based on the assumption that an investor will hold his shares for six months, until shortly before their hedges expire or until they are called away, whichever comes first). Next, you’ll need to subtract the hedging costs you calculated in the previous step from the potential returns you calculated for each position, and sort the securities by their potential returns net of hedging costs, or net potential returns. The securities that come to the top of that sort are the ones you’ll want to consider for your portfolio. Fine-Tuning Portfolio Construction You’ll want to stick with round lots (numbers of shares divisible by 100) to minimize hedging costs. Another fine-tuning step is to minimize cash that’s leftover after you make your initial allocation to round lots of securities and their respective hedges. Because each security is hedged, you won’t need a large cash position to reduce risk. And since returns on cash are so low now, by minimizing cash you can potentially boost returns. In this step, our method searches for what we call a “cash substitute”: that’s a security collared with a tight cap (1% or the current yield on a leading money market fund, whichever is higher) in an attempt to capture a better-than-cash return while keeping the investor’s downside limited according to his specifications. You could use a similar approach, or you could simply allocate leftover cash to one of the securities you selected in the previous step. Calculating An Expected Return While net potential returns are bullish estimates of how well securities will perform, net of their hedging costs, expected returns, in our terminology, are the more likely returns net of hedging costs. In a series of 25,412 backtests over an 11-year time period, we determined two things about our method of calculating potential returns: it generates alpha, and it overstates actual returns. The average actual return over the next six months in those 25,412 tests was 0.3x the average potential return calculated ahead of time. So, we use that empirically derived relationship to calculate our expected returns. Example Of A Hedged Portfolio Here is an example of a hedged portfolio created using the general process described above by the automated portfolio construction tool at Portfolio Armor . With that tool, you just enter the dollar amount you are looking to invest and the largest drawdown you are willing to risk (your “threshold” – in this case, 4%), and the tool does the rest. This portfolio was generated as of Monday’s close (results will vary at different times, depending on market conditions), and used as its inputs the parameters we mentioned for our hypothetical investor above: $1,000,000 to invest, and a goal of maximizing potential return while limiting downside risk, in the worst-case scenario, to a drawdown of no more than 4%. Worst-Case Scenario The “Max Drawdown” column in the portfolio level summary shows the worst-case scenario for this hedged portfolio. If every underlying security in it went to zero before the hedges expired, the portfolio would decline 3.97%. Negative Hedging Cost Note that, in this case, the total hedging cost for the portfolio was negative, -1%, meaning the investor would receive more income in total from selling the call legs of the collars on his positions than he spent buying the puts. Best-Case Scenario At the portfolio level, the net potential return is 3.55% (as predicted, it’s less than the potential return for the 20% threshold portfolio we alluded to above, which was 17.79%). This represents the best-case scenario, if each underlying security in the portfolio meets or exceeds its potential return. A More Likely Scenario The portfolio level expected return of 1.23% represents a more conservative estimate, based on the historical relationship between our calculated potential returns and actual returns. A Better Return Than Cash According to the FDIC , the national average rate for jumbo money market accounts as of August 31 was 0.12%, which equates to a 0.06% rate over 6 months. The 1.23% expected return of the hedged portfolio above is 20.5x as high. Of course, your maximum drawdown on the money market is 0%, which is not the case with the hedged portfolio. Each Security Is Hedged Note that in the portfolio above, each of the three underlying securities – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) (NASDAQ: GOOGL ), Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG ), and Precision Castparts (NYSE: PCP ) is hedged (Google appears twice in the portfolio, once as a primary security, hedged with an optimal collar capped at its potential return, and once hedged as a cash substitute, with its cap set at 1%. Because of the different way these positions are hedged, they have different expected returns). Hedging each security according to the investor’s risk tolerance obviates the need for broad diversification, and lets him concentrate his assets in a handful of securities with positive potential returns net of their hedging costs. Here’s a closer look at the hedge for one of these positions, ISRG: As you can see in first part of the image above, ISRG is hedged with an optimal collar with its cap set at 4.95%, which was the potential return Portfolio Armor calculated for the stock: the idea is to capture the potential return while offsetting the cost of hedging by selling other investors the right to buy ISRG if it appreciates beyond that over the next six months.[i] The cost of the put leg of this collar was $7,800, or 7.75% of position value, but, as you can see in the image below, the income from the short call leg was $6,660, or 6.61% as percentage of position value. Since the income from the call leg offset some of the cost of the put leg, the net cost of the optimal collar on ISRG was $1,140, or 1.13% of position value.[ii] Note that, although the cost of the hedge on this position was positive, the hedging cost of this portfolio as a whole was negative . Why These Particular Securities? Ordinarily, Portfolio Armor aims to include seven primary securities and one cash substitute for a $1 million portfolio, but very few securities can be cost effectively hedged against a drawdown of no more than 4%. Google, Intuitive Surgical, and Precision Castparts were exceptions on Monday. Of the three, readers might be most surprised to see Precision Castparts included, given the announcement last month that Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A ) (NYSE: BRK.B ) would acquire the company for $235 per share. Usually, Portfolio Armor won’t include a security after an announcement that it is going to be acquired, because option market sentiment indicates that there’s no chance of any significant further appreciation for the stock to be acquired. In this case, on Monday, option market sentiment indicated there was a chance for a small amount of further appreciation beyond the 2.35% the stock would rise if the Berkshire deal closes at $235. That said, Seeking Alpha contributor Lukas Neely estimates that there’s a 95% chance the Berkshire deal closes (“Is Warren Buffett’s Precision Castparts Deal A Merger-Arb Opportunity”), in which case, the actual return for this position, net of hedging costs, would be 0.35%, rather than the 1.25% our algorithm expects. Possibly More Protection Than Promised In some cases, hedges such as the ones in the portfolio above can provide more protection than promised. For an example of that, see this recent instablog post on hedging Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA ). Hedged Portfolios For Even More Risk-Averse Investors The hedged portfolio shown above was designed for a small investor who could tolerate a decline of as much as 4% over the next six months, but the same process can be used for investors who are even more risk-averse, willing to risk drawdowns of as little as 2%. Notes: [i] This hedge actually expires in a little more than 7 months, but the expected returns are based on the assumption that an investor will hold his positions for six months, until they are called away or until shortly before their hedges expire, whichever comes first. [ii] To be conservative, the net cost of the collar was calculated using the bid price of the calls and the ask price of the puts. In practice, an investor can often sell the calls for a higher price (some price between the bid and ask) and he can often buy the puts for less than the ask price (again, at some price between the bid and ask). So, in practice, the cost of this collar would likely have been lower. Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. (More…) I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.