The problem with employing any hedging strategy comes during a bull market. Everyone wants to hedge during a bear market but those hedges have to survive an up market too.
You just have to think of them as paying an insurance premium. Most of the time, the stock market goes up so you just have to make sure that insurance actually pays off when things go haywire.
It’s also important to understand you
you can’t hedge out every risk in your portfolio. Risk can change forms but never goes away completely.
There are much simpler hedges out there than trying to use options or a tail-risk strategy.
Simple hedges include:
- Holding more liquid assets like cash to dampen volatility and provide optionality.
- Setting the right asset allocation ahead of time that you’d be comfortable with during both bull and bear markets.
- Saving more money to give yourself a bigger margin of safety.