An equity wealth preservation strategy: Following the macro trend

Abstract

Financial crisis have happened in the past and will continue to do so in the future. In the most recent 2008 crisis, global equities (as measured by the MSCI ACWI index) lost a staggering 54.2% in USD, on the year. During those periods wealth preservation becomes at the top of most investor’s concerns. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that protects the investment during bear markets and significant market corrections, generates capital appreciation, and that can support Millennium BCP’s Wealth Management Unit on their asset allocation procedures. This strategy extends the Dual Momentum approach introduced by Gary Antonacci (2014) in two ways. First, the investable set of securities in the equities space increases from two to four. Besides the US it will comprise the Japanese, European (excl. UK) and EM equity indices. Secondly, it adds a volatility filter as well as three indicators related to the business cycle and the state of the economy, which are relevant to decide on the strategy’s exposure to equities. Overall the results attest the resiliency of the strategy before, during and after historical financial crashes, as it drastically reduces the downside exposure and consistently outperforms the benchmark index by providing higher mean returns with lower variance