EDHEC-Risk Institute study illustrates that short-term risk control is not incompatible with long-term investment performance
11 April 2013
The publication, "Hedging versus Insurance: Long-Horizon Investing with Short-Term Constraints", demonstrates that failing to separate long-term risk-aversion and short-term loss aversion may lead to poor investment decisions.
As an illustration, the research points to a 32 per cent opportunity cost when managing maximum drawdown constraints inefficiently through an excessive level of hedging.
The authors of the study, Romain Deguest, Lionel Martellini and Vincent Milhau, draw two major conclusions from their work:
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Relatively simple solutions exist that can be implemented as dynamic asset allocation strategies in order to control short-term risk levels while maintaining access to long-term sources of performance.
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These solutions are a substantial improvement over traditional strategies without dynamic risk control, which inevitably lead to under-spending of investors' risk budgets in normal market conditions, with a strong associated opportunity cost, and over-spending of investors' risk budget in extreme market conditions.
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