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Perspective
Buffer Madness
May 8, 2025
Last month, we posted a short piece critical of options-based strategies such as “defined outcome funds” and “buffered ETFs”. It showed that the vast majority of them failed to deliver either better returns or less-severe drawdowns than a simple combination of passive equities + cash. Since then, we’ve gotten quite a bit of—let’s call it—feedback. My partner Dan, who wrote the original, now writes the devastating response to his predictable critics. My only criticism is he is too kind.
Perspective
Rebuffed: A Closer Look at Options-Based Strategies
March 21, 2025
Options-based strategies, often labeled with words like “Buffered,” “Overlay,” and “Defined Outcome” have amassed a sizeable chunk of investors’ money, lured by the promise of market-like returns with less risk. These strategies use options to capture the upside or downside of an asset’s returns, and managers who employ a mix of options can tailor an asset’s risk/return profile to align with an investor’s goals. But can they actually deliver?
Journal Article
International Diversification—Still Not Crazy after All These Years
May 3, 2023
International diversification has hurt US-based investors for over 30 years, but the long-run case for it remains relevant. We show that both financial theory and common sense favor international diversification, buttressed by empirical supportive evidence. Additionally we show it would be dangerous to extrapolate the post-1990 outperformance of US equities.
White Paper
Re-Emerging Equities
March 28, 2023
The expected premium for investing in emerging versus developed equity markets is on the upper end of its past 25-year range. At the same time, many of the risks historically associated with emerging markets have secularly declined. We believe there is a strong case for investors to “re-up” their emerging allocations.
Journal Article
Tail Risk Hedging: Contrasting Put and Trend Strategies
July 8, 2020
The sharp market fall and speedy recovery during the eventful first half of 2020 has kept tail risk hedging topical: investors have both fresh memories of a painful loss and renewed fears of a repeat. We try to offer a balanced overview of the strengths and weaknesses of direct and indirect tail hedging strategies.
Journal Article
Portfolio Protection? It’s a Long (Term) Story…
April 23, 2020
Investors have a natural urge to protect their portfolios from sudden crashes, even though bad outcomes that unfold over longer periods are more detrimental to reaching long-term goals. We show risk-mitigating and diversifying strategies have added value more consistently than options-based hedging over the more important, longer drawdowns.
White Paper
Chasing Your Own Tail (Risk), Revisited
November 19, 2019
As investors turn to addressing the risk of a severely declining market, we summarize five approaches to building a more resilient portfolio.
DC Solutions Series: Defensive Equity, Part 2
February 15, 2017
In part two of this two-part series, we focus on the implementation of a defensive equity strategy within the context of a DC retirement plan.
Journal Article
Embracing Downside Risk
January 15, 2017
This paper shows that downside risk tends to be the main source of long-run returns in equities and other asset classes, and argues that long-term investors may be better off embracing downside risk in certain cases.
Journal Article
Superstar Investors
December 6, 2016
Many famous investors are outspoken about their investment philosophies and use them selectively. We seek to apply their wisdom systematically to determine whether their philosophies, if applied broadly, might still generate “alpha.”