7 Steps to Successful Low Volatility Investing

7 Steps to Successful Low Volatility Investing

When I began my career as a trader more than a decade ago, I often told my colleagues that as traders we got paid for taking risk.  That’s what I was taught in my MBA classes – there is a fundamental tradeoff between risk and reward.  Investors must take on more risk to have the opportunity for higher returns.

This bedrock principle of market relationships forms the basis of key financial theories such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis and CAPM.

Except that it’s wrong.

Investors do not get paid for taking on more risk.  The exact opposite is often true.  Data shows that a portfolio of low risk stocks has consistently out-performed a portfolio of high risk stocks on a risk-adjusted basis in the U.S. since 1926 and in almost every market around the world.1

This is called the “low volatility anomaly” in the academic world.  For traders and active investors it may be as close to a “free lunch” as we’ll ever experience.

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In this three part series I’ll cover 7 important steps on how to create and trade a low volatility portfolio.  This approach can allow traders to benefit from the low volatility anomaly while enhancing returns by combining short-term trading strategies with intermediate-term strategies.

The Low Volatility Anomaly

The low volatility anomaly was first formally reported in 1972 using data over the period from 1926 through 1971.  In the past 40 years numerous studies have verified the persistence of this finding that low volatility stocks outperform high volatility stocks.

The Financial Analyst Journal states that the “long-term outperformance of low-risk portfolios is perhaps the greatest anomaly in finance.  Large in magnitude, it changes the basic notion of a risk-return trade-off.”

The basic study takes the universe of stocks, including de-listed stocks, for the geographic region you are studying and ranks the equities by risk.  You can use either standard deviation or beta as your measure of risk and you’ll get the same result.  Next you group the stocks into 10 equal sized buckets (deciles).

Each of these 10 buckets represents a portfolio of stocks.  Bucket 1 is the lowest risk stocks and bucket 10 is the ten percent with the highest risk.  Each month you re-rank the stocks and rebalance the 10 portfolios.3

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This graph demonstrates the annualized return for each of the 10 portfolios.  The lowest risk portfolio outperformed the highest risk portfolio by an average of 19.2% over the period of 1990-2011!

This basic study has been repeated in numerous developed and emerging markets around the world. 3

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Few, if any, market phenomena are so pervasive and persistent.  And yet so rarely discussed or exploited.4  

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Despite this evidence, prior to 2005 very little money was invested in low-volatility strategies.   Recently, however, we have seen the emergence of a number of low volatility ETFs such as SPLV, XMLV, and USMV.

These new ETFs offer a passive, buy-and-hold approach to augment investors’ portfolios.  However, there can be much more effective ways for traders and active investors to benefit from low volatility investing.

7 Steps to Successful Low Volatility Investing

The most basic objective of market participants (both individuals and institutional investors) is to achieve higher returns while lowering risk.  And there are many different ways that traders, investors, and professional portfolio managers go about trying to accomplish this objective.

Over the past 9 years LCA Capital and its affiliate company, Connors Research, have developed a unique methodology to creating an active low volatility portfolio.

The 7 Step Low Volatility Investing Method:

(1)  Focus primarily on large cap stocks

(2)  Buy stocks with low volatility; and, if appropriate, sell short stocks with high volatility

(3)  Diversify portfolios by using strategies with different hold periods (time horizons)

(4)  Buy high momentum stocks for longer hold periods

(5)  Buy stocks that are under-priced and sell short stocks that are over-priced when holding positions for shorter time periods

(6)  Go to cash and/or increase short allocations in adverse market environments (i.e. use a market timing overlay)

(7)  Hedge strategies with higher than desired volatility

In parts 2 and 3 of this series we will investigate each of these 7 steps in detail.

 

References:

1     Risk and the Rate of Return on Financial Assets: Some Old Wine in New Bottles (Haugen and Heins, 1975). 

2     2011 Financial Analyst Journal, January/February issue, volume 67, no.1, www.cfapubs.org

3     Low Risk Stocks Outperform within All Observable Markets of the World (Baker and Haugen, 2012) and lowvolatilitystocks.com.  Study of 2997 U.S stocks and 9494 stocks from 21 developed countries; standard deviation over previous 24 months was used as the measure of risk.

4     Low-volatility investing: a long term perspective (Pim van Vliet), VBA Journaal, no. 108, Winter 2011.

5     The Missing Risk Premium: Why Low Volatility Investing Works (Erik Falkenstein), 2012.