It's A Learning Process

Barron's has an article titled How To Diversify Your Portfolio With Alternative Investments. It's a long read that tries to go deep but there are couple of points that I think will lead anyone who is new to the concept down an unproductive path. 

The article cites nine different alt categories, some of the names were very vague, which I think complicates the task of how research is done. I would probably narrow down to two strategies; very low volatility like a horizontal line that hopefully tilts up and things that should go up when stocks go down. 

Within each category there are many different strategies and anyone can go as far as they want to study those strategies but as an example, both merger arbitrage and convertible arbitrage both fit into the very low volatility/horizontal line that hopefully tilts up category. It is important to understand that nothing is infallible which is why you don't want to put 25% into just one. Yes, both examples will very likely "work" far more often than not but that one time they don't could be disastrous if you have a huge allocation. Diversify your diversifiers. 

Managed futures and long short the way that AGFiQ US Market Neutral Anti-Beta (BTAL) does it are examples of strategies in the category of things that should go up when stocks go down. Inverse funds would be another example and gold is an example of one that has worked in past events, it was up a lot during the financial crisis but not really this year. In the current market event it is not down anywhere near as much as the S&P 500 or a 60/40 portfolio as measured by VBAIX but still down a good bit. BTAL is a client and personal holding. Diversify your diversifiers. 

The article devoted some time to business development companies, aka BDCs, as alternatives. You can read the article for the fundamental reasons why BDCs might be alts but assuming the article's reasoning is exactly right, what does that actually look like?

 

It looks like the stock market. Not what you want for an alt in the context we are talking about nor what I think the article had in mind. Those three symbols are the BDCs that were mentioned in the article and I threw levered fund TQQQ in there because the volume number blocked the percentages for the BDCs in comparison the S&P 500. 

The article also mentioned REITs. 15 years ago, there was a lot of chatter about REITs and MLPs as diversifiers and I made the point repeatedly that they would not offer protection from large declines. The merits of owning them might make for a long list, or not, up to you, but protection from large declines is not one of the merits. Ditto BDCs.

If you're curious, the three charted BDCs fared worse than the S&P 500 during the 2020 Pandemic Crash. In the Christmas Crash of 2018, two of the three were very similar to the S&P 500 and one did quite a bit worse. 

If you're going to buy something to protect against large declines, you should have some basis to expect it will actually protect from large declines whether that means being a horizontal line or that it goes up when stocks go down. The names and strategies we've been writing about all summer provide that basis. Any of them could not work in any given event of course (repeated for emphasis) but something that has worked most of the time will probably work most of the time in the future. Still though, diversify your diversifiers for the (hopefully) rare occasions they don't. 

I would reiterate a final point which is that whenever this current market event ends and prices go back up, all of these should be expected to lag. When stocks are going up, you own too many alts and when stocks are going down you wish you had more. That is the nature of it.