The initial academic work on the returns of private equity investments generally found underperformance relative to public market benchmarks like the S&P 500. More recent research, which apparently uses higher-quality data, is coming to the opposite conclusion. But is it really? Professor Ludovic Phalippou from the University of Oxford argues that while this recent research appears to be valid, the S&P 500 isn’t the right benchmark.
Folks have been lighting up my inbox with questions and comments about an Advisor Perspectives pieceby Michael Edesess (link included for the three of you who may not have seen the piece … you three may also not be aware that Miley Cyrus appeared on the MTV Video Music Awards … link not included).
The article is critical of DFA’s recent work on profitability. I’ll focus most of my comments on the contents of Edesess’s section entitled “How the DFA argument is flawed.”
The debate about whether the size and value premiums have existed on paper was settled many years ago. The long-term historical data clearly shows robust size and value premiums. The average annual U.S. size and value premiums have been 3.6 and 4.8 percent, respectively, from 1927-2012. What has been more hotly debated, however, is whether these premiums could actually be captured in the real world net of transactions costs and fund expense ratios. In my opinion, even this debate is a bit silly at this point. If you examine the returns of intelligently built, low-cost mutual funds that have been designed specifically to capture these premiums, it’s clear they’ve been successful.
Last week, I outlined how to construct a portfolio of stocks and high-quality bonds to replicate the returns of high-yield corporate bonds. This week I’m tackling investment-grade corporate bonds.The same basic logic as last week holds: There’s not much unique about investment-grade corporate bonds that you can’t achieve with a diversified portfolio of stocks and high-quality bonds. The only difference is you don’t need as much in stocks to replicate the returns of investment-grade corporate bonds as you do with high-yield corporate bonds. This is because high-yield corporate bonds are more similar to stocks because they both have substantial exposure to default risk. Investment-grade corporate bonds have less default risk and therefore aren’t as similar to stocks.
With interest rates at low levels for a number of years now, many investors have moved some portion of their high-quality bond portfolios to higher-yielding investments like high-yield corporate bonds. I’ve long argued that there’s not much these strategies add relative to a traditional stock fund and high-quality bond strategy. Further, the traditional stock fund and high-quality bond allocation strategy tends to have lower costs and be more tax efficient. This is a bit of a qualitative argument though, and I wanted to illustrate the point quantitatively.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve focused on high-yield corporate bonds, but three other yield-oriented investments I frequently get asked about are high-dividend stocks, preferred stocks and oil-and-gas master limited partnerships (MLPs). In the past couple of years, I’ve found that most investors who ask about these strategies are contemplating using them in place of high-quality fixed income because “fixed income rates are low.”
In last week’s post, I referenced the performance of high-yield corporate bonds during periods of stock market turmoil. Unfortunately, we now have more recent data to evaluate how high-yield corporate bonds tend to perform during periods of bad stock market performance. The S&P 500 was down about 0.6 percent in April, 6.0 percent in May and about 2.4 percent in June (through June 4). The backdrop of the poor performance is an apparently slowing U.S. economy and a heightening of the Eurozone debt crisis, with the health of the Spanish banking system being the current area of focus.
I got an e-mail this past week noting that Vanguard would be closing its high-yield corporate bond fund to new investors “effectively immediately” and that the fund had received “approximately $2 billion” of flows over the past six months. While growth of Vanguard’s assets under management is almost always a good thing, a fund shuttering its doors to new flows makes one wonder just how frothy credit markets have become. Let’s take a step back, though, and look at high-yield fixed income as an asset class. I find that many investors simply don’t understand what returns high-yield bonds have historically generated or just how closely correlated they are with the equity markets.
Recent Comments