Adaptive Asset Allocation

Dynamic Global Portfolios to Profit in Good Times - and Bad

Adam Butler, Michael Philbrick, Rodrigo Gordillo

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119220350
• eBook ISBN: 9781119220374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

Build an agile, responsive portfolio with a new approach to global asset allocation

Adaptive Asset Allocation is a no-nonsense how-to guide for dynamic portfolio management. Written by the team behind Gestaltu.com, this book walks you through a uniquely objective and unbiased investment philosophy and provides clear guidelines for execution. From foundational concepts and timing to forecasting and portfolio optimization, this book shares insightful perspective on portfolio adaptation that can improve any investment strategy. Accessible explanations of both classical and contemporary research support the methodologies presented, bolstered by the authors' own capstone case study showing the direct impact of this approach on the individual investor.

Financial advisors are competing in an increasingly commoditized environment, with the added burden of two substantial bear markets in the last 15 years. This book presents a framework that addresses the major challenges both advisors and investors face, emphasizing the importance of an agile, globally-diversified portfolio.

• Drill down to the most important concepts in wealth management
• Optimize portfolio performance with careful timing of savings and withdrawals
• Forecast returns 80% more accurately than assuming long-term averages
• Adopt an investment framework for stability, growth, and maximum income

An optimized portfolio must be structured in a way that allows quick response to changes in asset class risks and relationships, and the flexibility to continually adapt to market changes. To execute such an ambitious strategy, it is essential to have a strong grasp of foundational wealth management concepts, a reliable system of forecasting, and a clear understanding of the merits of individual investment methods. Adaptive Asset Allocation provides critical background information alongside a streamlined framework for improving portfolio performance.

Part I
The Philosophy of Successful Investing

Eleanor Roosevelt is credited with the timeless insight that we would be wise to learn from the mistakes of others because we don't live long enough to make them all ourselves. Truly, too few of us take this to heart, preferring to ignore the wisdom of experience and learn the same lessons over and over the hard way.

Count us among this group.

Knowing what we know now about human nature and psychology, we are no longer surprised by our own frequent episodes of hubris, attribution bias, various logical atrocities, or any number of other equally destructive cognitive foibles. Nor are we particularly surprised by the occasional but negative consequences that inevitably arise from these shortcomings. They are a fact of life for all humans, and we come by them honestly. These genetic qualities were, after all, forged in the crucible of a dark and dangerous past where careful and unemotional problem solving was necessarily subordinated to activities which furthered our need to feed and shelter ourselves, and avoid predators.

Unfortunately, many of the instincts and heuristics, which served us so well on the ancient veldt, work at cross-purposes to our long-term goals in modern society. It is fortunate then that, as we will explore at length in the first section of this book, there are ways to short-circuit the destructive behaviors of our “lizard brains.” But the first step is acknowledgment.

One psychological quality that has endured through the ages and continues to serve us well today is our ability to learn from mistakes. In fact, for many of us this is the only way we learn. And when we say learn, what we really mean is “change our behavior.” This is an important distinction, because if a consequence doesn't cause you to change your behavior then you haven't really learned a lesson.

The hard truth is that most often, change stems from a cycle of crisis leading to necessity, which, in turn, provides the requisite motivation. Recall the smoker who finally quits when he is diagnosed with lung cancer or the alcoholic who must hit rock bottom before abandoning the bottle. A person must acutely feel the urgency of change in order to muster the extraordinary effort and courage that it takes to become a new person with different beliefs and behaviors.

We—the authors and members of our executive team—have abundant war wounds and scars from battles with the market, which remind us daily of the consequences of failing to manage our propensity for economically destructive behavior. If you require a case-in-point, consider my (Adam's) first experience on a trading floor after graduating from university with a BA in psychology. In my first 17 months, I “earned” over $2.5 million in profits for my proprietary trading desk, only to lose $4 million in the eighteenth month. This was a lesson in itself, but it was galvanized by a real consequence, which affected me directly: getting fired.

On being dismissed, it was easy to blame bad luck, poor supervision, the Russian debt default, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and the Asian currency crisis. But with the benefit of perspective, it is impossible to avoid the fact that naivety and hubris—qualities of my character at the time—contributed far more to my failure than the environment in which I operated.

The members of our team all have different stories, but every single one ended with the same outcome: negative behavior led to crisis, which catalyzed lasting change. While these crises were painful and destructive at the time, we all look on these experiences with a deep appreciation, as they laid the foundation for our current success and the success of the clients we are privileged to serve.

Much has changed for our team over the years. We've made research and education central to our ongoing process of self-evaluation and improvement. Furthermore, we've made much of our lessons available to the entire world—for free—on Gestaltu.com, our blog. But, perhaps most importantly, in managing investments for clients and holding ourselves to the highest standard of care, we have come to stand for something square and real, a true Iron Law of Wealth Management:

We would rather lose half of our clients during a raging bull market than half of our clients' money during a vicious bear market.

Whether or not you've previously heard of the Iron Law, it's not a trivial principle. Consider, for a moment, your reminiscence of the tech bubble bursting, or the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. If you're like most of the new clients we meet every day, these experiences hollowed you out inside. You faced the abyss, and the abyss looked right back at you. Money is a means to an end, not an end unto itself; diminished financial resources wilt overall quality of life and at extremes dash long-held dreams that can fracture your identity.

Still, perhaps an even more troubling observation on the theme of “learning from crisis” might be the proportion of investors who suffered deep losses in both the tech bubble and 2008 global financial crisis. What lessons did investors learn from those sleepless nights staring into the abyss? What changes did people make in order to ensure they never—ever—experienced that kind of despair again?

Winston Churchill once observed that “[People] occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” As we interact with financial advisers and investment managers today, we can confidently state that very few of the people clients trust with their precious retirement funds have learned any permanent lessons from their experiences over the past couple of decades. When they stumble over the truths we'll discuss in this book, they pick themselves up, and hurry back to doing things as if nothing ever happened.

We hope that won't be the case for you. But we understand that the most important course corrections in life often result from crisis, and that, unfortunately, thoughtful self-analysis and pensive reflection are rarely catalysts for meaningful change. Change is motivated by emotion, not logic, which is why you might find it difficult to change the way you think just from reading a book.

But some of you might already be on the verge of change, carrying with you the emotional scars of a turbulent and ongoing battle with the markets. If so, there's a decent chance that you lost faith in the traditional investment process some time ago and have struggled to find an alternative.

We wrote this book for you. It's time to forge a new path. Let's get started.

Chapter 1
The Most Important Concepts in Wealth Management

Years ago, in the span of a couple weeks, we sat down with two prospective clients. Both of them were nearing retirement and wanted to make sure that they were prepared. Both were senior executives at their respective firms, had high incomes, solid benefits, and substantial investment portfolios. And most importantly, both had large holdings of their company's stock.

Both worked for Fortune 500 organizations: the first for a pharmaceutical company, the second for an energy firm. Both of them had financial backgrounds, including master's degrees in business. In other words, they were “numbers” guys. Being a senior executive in finance is an interesting role, inasmuch as it tends to instill a sense of confidence.

It was this confidence, borne of familiarity with their respective companies, that made them resistant to the idea of diversifying their substantially concentrated positions of firm stock. It certainly didn't help matters that the success of these firms was one of the primary reasons that they were both so well off. Comfortable in the idea that their levels of wealth would afford them the luxuries of a leisurely retirement, neither of them was willing to sell any of their company stock.

But, there was a problem: the pharmaceutical company was Abbott Labs and the energy firm was Enron.

After Enron's 2001 bankruptcy, the stories of destitute ex-employees covered the airwaves. We were bombarded by countless tales of heartbreak: Entire investment accounts had vanished, along with the dreams they had previously inspired. It was, in every sense, a national tragedy. It was also a cautionary tale, and in its retelling now, a teachable moment.

Despite reaching out on several occasions, we never heard from Mr. Enron again. Mr. Abbott, having internalized the reality that fate alone spared him a more tragic outcome, ultimately sold 85 percent of his company stock and diversified his portfolio with the proceeds.

Concentrated investments are but a single example of the myriad ways investors lose their financial bearings. Messrs. Abbott and Enron were laser focused on returns as the primary way of measuring success. Indeed, during their respective tenures, Abbott and Enron both outperformed the S&P 500 causing a false sense of security to set in.

Their confidence, nay, overconfidence in their firms was almost certainly exacerbated by a natural compulsion to seek out information that confirmed their positive biases. As long as one analyst in the financial or media world had something positive to say about Abbott or Enron, it was reason enough not to sell. They accepted the positive information that supported their biases while rejecting those opinions that ran contrary to what they thought they knew. And as if that wasn't enough, the lauds of peers—jealous that Messrs. Abbott and Enron's stocks were doing so well—cemented their beliefs.

That the stock was “beating the market” was all that mattered in the moment. But with the benefit of hindsight, their belief that they knew why was a complete delusion and the social pressure they were under completely inhibited their skepticism.

The sad reality is that this isn't an isolated, one-time incident. We see this happen more than we care to recount.

Even for the most sophisticated investors, there exists an unrelenting psychological urge to know whether we're succeeding or failing at this very moment. The easiest way to do this is to measure individual performance against a benchmark such as the S&P 500 or the S&P/TSX Composite Index. What few people realize, however, is that such comparisons are ultimately just distractions from what really matters. Those who judge their portfolio by its performance relative to some narrow benchmark are focusing on an issue that is largely irrelevant to their ultimate financial success. And yet, every prospective client that walks into our office invariably asks how our investment methods stack up against “the market” over some completely arbitrary historical period.

While we'll delve into this more deeply throughout this book, it's worth momentarily pausing for a high-level exploration of why comparisons to benchmarks aren't useful. A simple thought experiment should suffice. Let's imagine a world with two asset classes—stocks and bonds—that behave like we imagine that they should. In other words, over time, stocks have higher returns and higher volatility while bonds have lower returns and lower volatility. Assuming an investor identified some financial goal that they want to accomplish in the future—literally a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Philosophy of Successful Investing
• Part II: Saving and Withdrawing from Portfolios
• Part III: Current High Valuations Mean Lower Future Returns
• Part IV: An Investment Framework for Stability, Growth, and Maximum Income
• Part V: Why You Should Trust the Research
• Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement