Before we kick off this week’s issue, we encourage you to check out Newfound Research’s Flirting with Models podcast which recently featured Omega Point’s Omer Cedar in which he discusses: how quantitative investors have impacted markets, how fundamental managers should think about factors, the low-hanging fruit for optimization, and surprising lessons he has learned in evaluating...
Last week we had focused on Volatility’s first major trend reversal since the Financial Crisis, adding its bullish 2020 turnaround to the growing list of unusual market behaviors we’ve seen in the COVID era. We compared sector drivers and correlations between today and 2009, and uncovered startling disparities alongside some remaining scraps of common ground. This week, we dig deeper...
Volatility has been on the run! For a factor that typically has abysmal performance and a very negative premia over time, Volatility is turning out to be 2020’s comeback kid. For all of the managers who actively tilt their portfolios away from this factor or manage ‘low volatility’ products, this recent trend from the Volatility factor could really be throwing a wrench into things.
Today, we’re going to wrap up our series on Value in the real-life context of a massively volatile and beaten down market. We’d like to start by noting that after the turbulence of the past few weeks, our Global Market factor is flagged as “Extremely Oversold” at -2.9 standard deviations below the mean:
We hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend with your family while we took the week off from Factor Spotlight to do the same. Today, we’re excited to introduce our latest product feature - the Experiments Manager, which is now available for all Omega Point members. The utility of Experiments revolves around portfolio rebalancing, as it allows you to evaluate different “what-if”...
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve discussed the benefits of using a smarter hedge basket vs. the standard and ubiquitous ETF hedges that most portfolio managers use to some extent. Most recently, we built a higher Volatility basket out of the SPY constituents, through which a manager could have made an incremental +5.68% return per year over the traditional SPY hedge.
Last week, we discussed the significant drawbacks of using the S&P 500 SPDR (SPY) as a market exposure hedge. We established that 1) the SPY hedge is wildly common among the institutional investment community (40% of the SPY’s AUM is short interest), and 2) it carries an inherent long bet on Volatility - a negative premia factor that’s down 32% over the past five years.
This week we’ll be kicking off a series on “smart hedging,” by which we aim to find a more efficient and elegant solution to hedging market exposure in your portfolio. We’ll also provide our weekly market and factor update.
In light of the substantial rally in the US market over the past week, we'll be refocusing our attention on our US model in order to see how the key
Volatility and
Market Sensitivity factors have behaved. We'll also attempt to identify what's been driving these factors by decomposing their underlying long and short components.
Typically, the factor trends that we observe in Factor Spotlight are based on our US model. This week, we'll be introducing our worldwide model by taking a look at how some of the major factors have behaved on the global level, compared to what we're seeing in the US.
