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Investments

Traditional balanced funds - return free risk?

Monday 19th of June 2017

The traditional diversified fund approach is the result of the work of Harry Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory, which was developed in the 1950s. It is based on using a broad selection of assets to create a portfolio that maximises the potential return for a specific tolerance for risk, risk being defined as the expected volatility those returns.

A particularly important set of assumptions is the correlations between asset classes; essentially, how closely the prices of each asset class (equities versus bonds for example) move together. The result should be less volatile returns from a balanced portfolio versus holding just one asset class.

In our opinion, there are two main problems with traditional diversified funds. These are the assumptions around risk and the requirement for these funds to be fully invested at all times.

Risk

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