Archives for July 2007

I feel like my last post about rebalancing wasn’t as thorough as I’d have liked it to be, so here I go again, adding some quick definitions and including a review of several research articles about the subject.

What is Rebalancing?
Let say you examine your risk tolerance and decide to invest in a mixture of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. As the years go by, your portfolio will drift one way or another. You may drop down to 60% stocks or rise up to 90% stocks. The act of rebalancing involves selling or buying shares in order to return to your initial stock/bond ratio of 70%/30%.

Why Rebalance?
Rebalancing is a way to maintain the risk/reward ratio that you have chosen for your investments. In the example above, doing nothing may leave you with a 90% stock/10% bond portfolio, which is much more aggressive than your initial 70%/30% stock/bond mix.

In addition, rebalancing also forces you to buy temporarily under-performing assets and sell over-performing assets (buy low, sell high). This is the exact opposite behavior of what is shown by many investors, which is to buy in when something is hot and over-performing, only to sell when the same investment becomes out of style (buy high, sell low).

However, in taxable accounts, rebalancing will create capital gains/losses and therefore tax consequences. In some brokerage accounts, rebalancing will incur commission costs or trading fees. This is why, if possible, it is a good idea to redirect any new investment deposits in order to try and maintain your target ratios.

How Often Should I Rebalance My Portfolio?
Some people rebalance on a certain time-based schedule – for example, once every 6-months, every year, or every 2 years. Others wait until certain asset classes shift a certain amount away from their desired targets before taking any action. A good source of research articles about which method is optimal can be found at the AltruistFA Reading Room. I’ve been reading through them the past few days, and I’ll try to provide a very general overview of the articles here.

So what is best? You may be surprised by the fact that not only is there no clear agreement on the answer to this question, but many of the articles actually contradict each other! For instance, compare this Journal of Investing article:

Over this period, regular monthly rebalancing returns dominated less active approaches. Should one infer that daily rebalancing is better still? Our data cannot say, but it seems plausible.

with this excerpt from an Efficient Frontier article:

So, what can we conclude from all this? Monthly rebalancing is too frequent. There are small rewards to increasing one’s rebalancing frequency from quarterly up to several years, but this comes at the price of increased portfolio risk.

Eh? I believe that this is because their results vary significantly with the time period chosen and asset classes being used in their back-tested scenarios.

Then there is this paper from Financial Planning magazine, which used the 25 year period from Oct. 1977-Sept. 2002 and a 60% Stock (S&P 500 Index) and 40% Bond (Lehman Bros. Gov’t Index) as the starting/target allocation. Here are the results for various rebalancing frequencies:

The various rebalancing periods showed minimal performance differences, although annual rebalancing held a slight return margin and a higher risk margin.

Because the risk-adjusted performance differences among the portfolios were small, the answer to the question of when to rebalance–monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually–depends mainly on the costs to the investor of rebalancing.

Efficient Frontier’s Bernstein also agreed in the this last respect, stating “The returns differences among various rebalancing strategies are quite small in the long run.”

In the “wait for a significant shift before taking action” camp is author Larry Swedroe, who I think also presents a very reasonable solution. From a WSJ article:

With major holdings like U.S. stocks, foreign stocks and high-quality U.S. bonds, consider rebalancing whenever your fund holdings get five percentage points above or below your targets, suggests Larry Swedroe, research director at Buckingham Asset Management in St. Louis. For instance, if you have 40% earmarked for bonds, you would rebalance if your bonds got above 45% or fell below 35%.

Meanwhile, for smaller positions in sectors like emerging markets and real-estate investment trusts, Mr. Swedroe recommends a 25% trigger. So if you have 5% targeted for emerging-market stocks, you’d rebalance if emerging markets balloon above 6.25% or fall below 3.75%. “You definitely want to be rebalancing, but you don’t want to be doing it too often,” Mr. Swedroe says. “You want to let stocks go up a bit before you sell, but not so much that you lose control of risk.”

Summary
Since it seems that there is no concrete right answer, I think the most important thing is to just make sure you set up some way to rebalance that does not involve any emotions or market timing. Don’t worry about the details, but don’t let your portfolio run off on its own either. I think the subtitle of one of the articles above sums it up quite well… ‘Tis Better To Have Rebalanced Regularly Than Not At All.

I have personally chosen to rebalance annually. This method keeps it simple while still controlling risk and offering potential extra return. If I recall correctly, it is also recommended in Ferri’s book All About Asset Allocation (review).

It’s been over a year since I came up with my current asset allocation mix, and I should really rebalance my current portfolio to match those percentages again. It really should only take a few minutes of spreadsheet math and some clicking online, but I’ve been plotting out a few long-term asset allocation changes in the meantime and I’ve been putting it off. I really must do one or the other soon.

Rebalancing is a way to maintain the risk/reward balance that you have chosen for your investments, and also forces you to buy temporarily under-performing assets and sell over-performing assets (buy low, sell high). How often one should re-balance their portfolio depends on a few factors. In taxable accounts, rebalancing will create capital gains/losses and therefore tax consequences. In some brokerage accounts, rebalancing will incur commission costs or trading fees. As for me, the vast majority of my retirement portfolio is in tax-sheltered accounts and in mutual fund accounts which are not subject to transaction fees. Some of my funds have redemption fees, though.

After that, some people rebalance on a certain time-based schedule – for example, once every 6-months, every year, or every 2 years. Others wait until certain asset classes shift a certain amount away from their desired targets. I will dig up some good articles on this topic later (here is one math-intensive article to start), but after my previous research I had settled on an annual rebalancing schedule. Of course, that was almost 15 months ago. 😳

If you rebalance, what is your criteria?

You have probably heard of hedge funds, which are investment funds somewhat similar to mutual funds in they pool together money from different investors, but with the very important difference that they have virtually no limitations on what they can invest in, and also have no requirements to disclose their holdings.

In order to invest in a hedge fund, you are usually required to be an accredited investor, which means that you either have a net worth of at least $1 million or have made at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 joint combined). Supposedly this is to show that you are savvy enough to navigate these loosely-regulated waters, but to me it seems like they just want you to be able to lose a ton of money on these sexy-sounding investments and not make a big fuss about it.

I was reminded of this when reading about the most recent big-name hedge fund failures:

Investors in two troubled Bear Stearns Cos. hedge funds that made big bets on subprime mortgages have been practically wiped out, the Wall Street firm said yesterday, in more evidence of the turmoil in this corner of the bond market.

Bear said one of its funds was worth nothing and another worth less than a 10th of its value from a few months ago after its subprime trades went bad, according to a letter Bear circulated and to people briefed by the firm. The Wall Street investment bank — known for its bond-trading savvy — has had to put up $1.6 billion in rescue financing.

Oops! I guess they didn’t hedge their credit risk exposure very well. For more reading, just run a search for Long Term Capital Management or see the Wikipedia entry:

Initially enormously successful with annualized returns of over 40% in its first years, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months and became the most prominent example of the risk potential in the hedge fund industry. The fund folded in early 2000.

Here is an example of hedge fund fraud:

An Atlanta hedge fund manager under suspicion of defrauding a group of investors that included several NFL players now faces criminal charges in connection with the collapse of funds that investors believed held up to $180 million.

While I plan to meet the requirement to become a accredited investor, and wouldn’t mind working for a hedge fund, I’m pretty sure I’ll never sink a penny into one. I just don’t see the need to take such risks.