In our last post, we took a quick look at building a portfolio based on the historical averages method for setting return expectations. Beginning in 1987, we used the first five years of monthly return data to simulate a thousand possible portfolio weights, found the average weights that met our risk-return criteria, and then tested that weighting scheme on two five-year cycles in the future. At the end of the post, we outlined the next steps for analysis among which performance attribution and different rebalancing schemes were but a few.
In our last post, we compared the three most common methods used to set return expectations prior to building a portfolio. Of the three—historical averages, discounted cash flow models, and risk premia models—no single method dominated the others on average annual returns over one, three, and five-year periods. Accuracy improved as the time frame increased. Additionally, aggregating all three methods either by averaging predictions, or creating a multivariate regression from the individual explanatory variables, performed better than two out of the three individual methods.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve examined the three major methods used to set return expectations as part of the portfolio allocation process. Those methods were historical averages, discounted cash flow models, and risk premia models. Today, we’ll bring all these models together to compare and contrast their accuracy.
Before we make these comparisons, we want to remind readers that we’re now including a python version of the code we use to produce our analyses and graphs.
In our last post, we applied machine learning to the Capital Aset Pricing Model (CAPM) to try to predict future returns for the S&P 500. This analysis was part of our overall project to analyze the various methods to set return expectations when seeking to build a satisfactory portfolio. Others include historical averages and discounted cash flow models we have discussed in prior posts. Our provisional analysis suggested that the CAPM wasn’t a great forecasting model.
Over the last few posts, we’ve discussed methods to set return expectations to construct a satisfactory portfolio. These methods are historical averages, discounted cash flow models, and risk premia. our last post, focused on the third method: risk premia. Using the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) one can derive the required return for a particular asset based on the market price of risk, the asset’s risk, and the asset’s correlation with the market.
Our last post discussed using the discounted cash flow model (DCF) as a method to set return expectations that one would ultimately employ in building a satisfactory portfolio. We noted that if one were able to have a reasonably good estimate of the cash flow growth rate of an asset, then it would be relatively straightforward to calculate the required return.
The problem, of course, is figuring out what the cash flow growth rate should be.
After our little detour into GARCHery, we’re back to discuss capital market expectations. In Mean expectations, we examined using the historical average return to set return expectations when constructing a portfolio. We noted hurdles to this approach due to factors like non-normal distributions, serial correlation, and ultra-wide confidence intervals.
While we highlighted these obstacles and offered a few suggestions to counteract such drawbacks, on first blush it didn’t seem like historical averages were all that satisfactory.
In our last post, we discussed using the historical average return as one method for setting capital market expectations prior to constructing a satisfactory portfolio. We glossed over setting expectations for future volatility, mainly because it is such a thorny issue. However, we read an excellent tutorial on GARCH models that inspired us at least to take a stab at it. The tutorial hails from the work of Marcelo S.
We’re taking a break from our extended analysis of rebalancing to get back to the other salient parts of portfolio construction. We haven’t given up on the deep dive into the merits or drawbacks of rebalancing, but we feel we need to move the discussion along to keep the momentum. This should ultimately tie back to rebalancing, but from a different angle. We’ll now start to examine capital market expectations.
Our last post on rebalancing struck an equivocal note. We ran a thousand simulations using historical averages across different rebalancing regimes to test whether rebalancing produced better absolute or risk-adjusted returns. The results suggested it did not. But we noted many problems with the tests—namely, unrealistic return distributions and correlation scenarios. We argued that if we used actual historical data and sampled from it, we might resolve many of these issues.