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If you have an asset that has an illiquidity premium, an optimizer will love it as a choice. An illiquidity premium is a dangerous area for investing. First, are you getting paid enough for illiquid? Second, is there a good way to measure illiquidity? Third, do you really know your liquidity needs?

The classic 60/40 stock bond asset mix has proven to be a good core asset allocation. When in doubt, employing the simple 60/40 (SPY/AGG) asset mix as a base case has been an allocation that has performed well versus other diversification strategies. This allocation bias may be coming to an end. 

“Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of thing… we are categorizing.”   
– Linguist George Lakoff
From The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy

Most investment work is about forming categories. We divide securities into asset classes. We make subcategories within an asset classes. We make industry classifications. We divide risks into different types of premia. There are value classifications. There are categories and classifications based on macro factors like inflation. Investors like to group. All scientists like to make groups and form clusters of similar things to find commonality.

Hedge funds styles, strategies, and firms evolve over time. The behavior of a hedge fund today is not the same as yesterday. These behavior changes are not because a manager has changed his style but because the environment, the tools, the regulations, and the ideas surrounding finance are different. 

Alpha generation will fall when it is measured correctly through an appropriate benchmark. Alpha shrinkage over the last ten years is a measurement problem. Returns for hedge funds are a combination of the underlying risk premia styles employed and the skill of the manager. 

A growing investment management theme over the last few years has been the incredible shrinking alpha. As investors gain more information on risk premia, there seems to be less alpha produced by managers. In reality, alpha production has likely not changed, but our measure of alpha has gotten more sophisticated so the skill associated with any manager seems to have declined or at least changed over the last decade. We can now tie what was previously thought of as alpha to specific risk factors. If alpha is tied to systematic risk factors, then it really is not alpha.

Trend-following and momentum has always been an important part of hedge funds and alternative investing but it would be hard to say that trend-following was mainstream thinking prior to the early 90’s. This was the high water period of the market efficiency, but that thinking started to take a major change with the “Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency”, published in the leading Journal of Finance. There were other papers that discussed similar topics and the behavioral finance paradigm shift had already begun, but this was the one paper that many academics started to quote with increasing frequency about momentum effects.

The losses in October are well-known. Now the question is whether these down moves will continue across styles, sectors, country indices, and bonds. The answer with few exceptions is the same. Market trends are pointed down and volatility is higher. For equity styles, short, medium and long-term trends are all pointing down. For market sectors, the only positive trend is with consumer stables, utilities, and real estate; the more defensive sectors. For country equity indices, the only strong positive standout was Brazil in reaction to their presidential election.  For bonds, short-term Treasuries offer some protection, but the longer-term trends are all down.