News and publications

Forward-looking aggregate equity market valuations, at least in Europe, still don't look excessive. However, under the hood, parts of the universe have experienced massive multiples expansion and are now more expensive than during the Dotcom bubble. At the same time, the cheaper stocks are as cheap as ever. Our study shows that this phenomenon is more broad-based than anecdotal evidence indicates, and we find it increasingly concerning.

Value stocks are assumed to have a shorter duration than growth stocks and are therefore expected to outperform during times of rising interest rates. Unfortunately, in practice, those correlations tend to be very noisy and less predictable than often presumed. In this article, we study the empirical relationship between the relative performance of the factor and changes in interest rates, inflation, and economic activity in the United States since the 80s.

A couple of research papers published decades ago taught investors that holding 20 to 30 single stocks results in a sufficiently diversified portfolio. This belief turned out to be stubbornly persistent even though numerous more sophisticated studies have since contested it. This paper looks into different definitions and measures of diversification and empirically assesses the limitations of concentrated portfolios through an approach using active risk minimization.

If you have every compared the performance of a typical asset allocation portfolio denominated in Swiss Franc with that of a comparable US Dollar portfolio, you probably got an impression of the power of foreign exchange rates. Still, according to our experience, many investors either neglect FX risk or tackle it in an overly simplistic way. This publication therefore elaborates on different heuristics and introduces a hedging approach based on portfolio optimization.