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The Case For Maintaining A Strategic Allocation To Real Assets

As investors continue to look for ways to diversify their portfolios away from traditional long-only stock and bond investments, real assets have become a popular alternative asset class. In fact institutional investors, such as leading endowments and foundations, have long used investments in real assets such as real estate, commodities, timber and energy as both a hedge against inflation and as a core diversifier. To provide more insight into this asset class and how institutional investors are using real assets, Michael Underhill, chief investment officer of Capital Innovations and a leading manager of multi-asset real return portfolios, answers a few questions for us on the topic. Given the increase in regional conflicts and greater overall geopolitical risks today, how is this influencing your respective portfolio positioning from both a macro and micro perspective? As geopolitical risks rise we would expect higher volatility in markets, increased risk of supply shocks to key commodities such as oil and food and a discounting of potential higher inflation and subsequent higher interest rates. As a hedge to these types of macro risks, exposure to real assets, and their relative inflation hedge qualities would become more attractive. Positioning on a more micro level we are incorporating these geopolitical risks and have been reducing our relative portfolio weighting in more interest rate sensitive groups such as electric utilities and telecomm and increasing more inflation hedge real assets such as energy, timber, agricultural commodities. What are the risks that investors should think about hedging or mitigating today and why? A common mistake investors make is to extrapolate current environment out too far and become complacent. The current environment of low interest rates, low inflation, and low volatility has afforded the opportunity to hedge the risk that this environment changes over the investment horizon. Do you want to bet that this backdrop we have had since the financial crisis does not change? The ideal time to add real asset exposure is when not many are thinking about it – buy an umbrella when the sun is shining. If we examine an allocation to real assets over the past 24 years, as shown in the chart below, we can see improved portfolio efficiency, with enhanced returns and lower volatility. Historical Effect of Allocating to Commodities (January 1980- July 2014) What are the opportunities investors should be seeking exposure to and why? In 2015, we expect improved global growth and a mid-year increase in US interest rates. The ECB and the BOJ remain in easing mode, and the policy outlook in the rest of the world varies considerably. The risk that global growth remains sluggish is high, and a lack of meaningful improvement could lead to a sharp increase in the dollar and a significant reorientation of capital flows. Most regions should see decreasing growth headwinds in 2015, although geopolitical uncertainties, volatile oil prices, and moderating Chinese growth remain concerns. It is for these reasons that we continue to advocate for a diversified, tactically managed, multi-asset portfolio that seeks to generate returns in excess of the actual rate of inflation and provides managed volatility rather than a single-asset-class solution. A broad range of real asset equity securities, including emerging markets and commodities, real estate investment trusts, and directly held positions in master limited partnerships. How does a global multi-asset real return strategy fit into a liability driven investing framework? The tangible properties of a real asset allow its price to fluctuate with overall market prices of physical assets. Real assets tend to be sensitive to inflation because of their tangible nature. Examples of real assets include direct investment in real estate, commodities, precious metals, timber, energy, farmland, precious metals, commodity-linked stocks, and commodity-linked hedge funds. Most investors are more familiar with investments in financial assets, which are contractual claims that do not generally have physical worth. In an LDI platform, real assets provide potential reductions in surplus volatility to the extent that real asset movements are not highly correlated to movements of financial assets. Returns from real assets may also boost returns since real assets are generally not as efficiently priced as the more competitively priced stocks and bonds. The return potential for real assets has become especially attractive in recent years since stocks and bonds have not performed well. From a risk management perspective, a key benefit from expanding asset classes to include real assets rests on correlations. A group of assets that have high correlations with each other but have low correlations with other groups of assets represent an asset class. There tends to be much less diversification potential from combining assets within an asset class than from combining assets from different asset classes. Real assets represent such a broad asset class that a wide range of correlations exist both within the asset class and with assets from other asset classes, allowing for attractive diversification. Our clients have found that the best performance comes from avoiding the large losses that markets often impose on passive investment portfolios. This tends to be especially important for real assets. As a first step we look behind the market consensus and identify where herding and overreaction phenomena may be at work. These phenomena occur both within and across asset classes. We perform extensive modeling with sensitivity analysis to find our best risk management strategy for an LDI structure. From there we model our best set of segments within an asset class and simulate the surplus volatility and return. This is not just simple quantitative analysis because we must also build in forward looking scenario planning. We track actual LDI performance against expected LDI performance. This type of tracking is revealing in that we can review what we were expecting when the allocations were set and identify where things developed differently. This type of learning over many years of experience is very helpful in building analysis skills.

The Liquidity Curse

Is the liquidity premium turning into a discount? Traditionally, investors have been willing to pay a premium for stock liquidity. This premium appears to be turning into a discount. Could this phenomenon last? Historically, market participants have been willing to pay a premium for liquidity. In the equity market, in the hypothetical situation of two otherwise identical stocks, the one with the better trading liquidity would be expected to command a premium over the less liquid stock. In other words, everything else being equal, a stock that is easier to trade (one with better liquidity, i. e., more trading volume) would be expected to be awarded a higher valuation multiple than the less liquid alternative. Frequent readers are well aware that I am a strong fan of Warren Buffett. He has repeatedly noted how perverse it is that investors treat stocks so differently from real estate, simply because stocks are a much more liquid investment. Paraphrasing Mr. Buffett, he recently remarked how absurd it would be if a homeowner liquidated his or her home just because a neighboring home was sold at a discount versus its fair value. Homeowners do not track the theoretical value of their homes on a daily basis, and their investment psychology is not affected by the price fluctuations in their homes anywhere near to the extent that they are when they see the price swings in their stock holdings. Thus, Mr. Buffett often reminds us that, in the short term, the equity market functions as a voting machine, whereas in the long run, it is more like a weighing machine. That is one of the key reasons behind the success of long-term equity investing. In the long run, the stock market weighs the cash flow generating ability of the underlying equities, whereas in the short term, fads and popularity tend to determine the price at which a particular stock trades at specific point in time. The implied discrepancy is what often creates wonderful buying opportunities in very desirable equities for the long term. How could trading liquidity ever be a bad thing? In the short run , better stock liquidity can certainly work against a stock price. Particularly in severe market-wide corrections (or if a specific stock is heavily owned by leveraged traders), a liquid stock may suffer disproportionately in the short term as traders take advantage of the relatively high liquidity to raise cash. This is when particularly attractive entry points are often created for long-term investors, but also why I advocate that such investors never use margin debt to increase their exposure to stocks. Owning stocks on a leveraged basis does potentially expose market participants to a sort of ‘liquidity curse’. One may receive a margin call and be forced to liquidate a particular stock in a sudden market correction. But other than that, trading liquidity should always be considered a positive characteristic in a stock, in my view. Still, and perhaps because investors seem to be increasingly shunning volatility, it appears almost as if the historical liquidity premium may be turning into a discount, and that the liquidity curse may be becoming more widespread and more of a permanent feature across equities! Much has been written lately about the millennials. The so-called millennial generation does seem generally less open to equity investing than previous generations were at the time they were in the age range of millennials today. Having seen their parents go through the burst of the TMT bubble and the global financial crisis may have traumatized millennials enough to generally shun investing in publicly traded equities, at least for the time being. That said, investing in private equity seems much more currently popular. This is reflected both in the staggering valuations now prevalent in a number of late-stage venture investments, as well as in the growing popularity of ‘crowdfunding’. More investors than in the past, perhaps bolstered by young people including millennials, seem to be increasingly comfortable tying up their funds in illiquid investments. Equity is equity, and that which is not traded in the public markets is almost by definition riskier than publicly traded stocks, even everything else being equal. Thus, it would seem as if more people are choosing venture capital and private equity at the expense of the public markets, at least implicitly preferring trading illiquidity. One hypothesis I have for this phenomenon is that it is less traumatic for those investors not to know exactly how much a particular equity investment they own is worth at a particular point in time, just as is the case in real estate.

3 Thriving ETFs With Over 500% AUM Growth In 2014

The global ETF industry has grown rapidly this year hitting a record of $2.76 trillion at the end of November with 1,659 products from 68 providers on three exchanges, as per the data from ETFGI . It is on track to cross the $3 trillion milestone in the first half of 2015. The industry has gathered $275.3 billion in new capital since the start of the year through November, representing all-time high inflows and surpassing the prior full-year net inflows. About 72% ($1.98 trillion) of the total AUM came from the U.S. ETFs. In fact, November has been the strongest month in 2014 with net inflows of $42 billion. Equity products have been leading the way higher with net inflows of $38.8 billion, followed by $4.9 billion inflows in fixed income products last month. Commodity ETFs/ETPs were the laggards with $221 million of asset outflows. The U.S. ETF industry has hit the $2 trillion mark this week, accumulating $232 billion in new assets year-to-date buoyed by massive inflows into the equity products. It easily topped last-year record inflows of $188 billion. This is especially true as investors continue pouring their money into the equity ETFs on rising confidence in the U.S. economic growth, accelerating job market, renewed optimism in housing recovery, low interest rates, low energy prices, healthy corporate earnings, and a flurry of merger & acquisition activities. Further, the U.S. has enjoyed back-to-back quarters of strong growth not seen in more than a decade. The economy expanded at a solid clip of 3.9% annually in the third quarter, up from the initial estimate of 3.5%, and was preceded by 4.6% growth in the second quarter. The country is also on track for the strongest annual job growth since late 1999. This suggests that the U.S. has emerged as a stronger nation trumping global economic concerns and geopolitical threats of 2014. Moreover, the Fed’s latest dovish comment that it is not in a hurry to raise interest rates has propelled the U.S. stocks higher. As a result, a number of U.S. equity ETPs have seen over 500-fold increase this year. Below, we have highlighted some of those in detail: iPath S&P MLP ETN (NYSEARCA: IMLP ) MLP ETPs have gained immense popularity this year, primarily due to crumbling oil prices that have badly hurt the overall energy space. This is because MLPs have lower correlations to oil price and thrive in a low oil price environment, thereby having stable revenues. Beyond the stability, yields are also pretty high thanks to favorable tax rules that push firms in the MLP space to substantially pay out all of their income to investors on a regular basis. Further, these firms remain the major beneficiaries of the U.S. oil boom over the longer term. While most of the products in this space have substantially increased their sizes, IMLP emerged as the biggest winner. Its AUM surged to $775.9 million from about $52 million at the start of 2014. The ETN follows the S&P MLP Index and charges 80 bps in fees per year from investors. It sees good volume of about 147,000 shares per day on average and has added 4.2% so far this year (read: 3 Promising MLP ETFs Now on Sale ). VelocityShares Volatility Hedged Large Cap ETF (NYSEARCA: SPXH ) While 2014 is turning out as another banner year for the U.S. stock market, volatility has also been on the rise thanks to global economic slowdown concerns, geopolitical tensions, and lower oil prices. As a result, many investors have taken advantage of the rising volatility while protecting their long equity positions simultaneously by investing in volatility hedged equity ETFs. Investors should note that the space is not much crowded and most of the products gained greater traction this year. Out of these, SPXH has pulled in over $73 million in capital, propelling its total asset base to $83.3 million. The ETF tracks the VelocityShares Volatility Hedged Large Cap Index and looks to hedge “volatility risk” in the S&P 500, offering investors’ exposure to not only the S&P 500 but also both long and inverse exposure in short-term VIX futures (read: Hedge Volatility in Your Portfolio with These Alternative ETFs ). The product provides target equity exposure of 85% to the S&P 500 while the remaining 15% goes to the volatility strategy. It trades in a light volume of roughly 20,000 shares a day and charges 71 bps in annual fees. The ETF has gained nearly 8% this year. ProShares S&P 500 Aristocrats ETF (NYSEARCA: NOBL ) In the current ultra-low rate environment and amid global uncertainty, investors have become defensive and are seeking safe and stable investments. Dividend Aristocrats generally act as a hedge against economic uncertainty and provide downside protection by offering outsized payouts or sizable yields on a regular basis. In addition, aristocrats tend to skew the portfolio to less volatile sectors and mature companies (read: Guide to Dividend Aristocrat ETFs ). This fund has accumulated about 87% of the AUM as $428 million inflows this year shot up its total asset base to $490.3 million. Expense ratio is 0.35% while average daily volume is moderate at 78,000 shares. The product provides exposure to the companies that raised dividend payments annually for at least 25 years by tracking the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. Holding 54 stocks in its basket, the fund is widely diversified across securities as each accounts for less than 2.2% share. Consumer staples dominates about one-fourth of the portfolio while industrials, consumer discretionary, and health care round off the next threes pots with double-digit exposure. NOBL surged about 16% on the year and has 30-day SEC yield of 1.84%. It has a Zacks ETF Rank of 1 or ‘Strong Buy’ rating with a Medium risk outlook.