Journal to portfolio afterlife

Job searching while unemployed is like having your portfolio in a drawdown: you might find a job tomorrow but the fact that you are not sure about it today, makes it harder to endure. That’s the psychological difference between looking at drawdowns in a backtest and living one: you miss the surety that stocks will see another All Time High. This uncertainty drives the majority of pain and stress.
 
Blitz’s findings are of significance, as he demonstrated that the empirical data rejects the hypothesis that a higher risk-free rate implies higher total expected stock returns. Instead, total expected stock returns appear to be unrelated (or perhaps even inversely related) to the level of the risk-free return, implying that the equity risk premium is higher when the risk-free return is low than when it is high. With that said, a takeaway should be that investors cannot use the historical data to implement a profitable tactical asset allocation rule. However, his results do present a challenge to the conventional wisdom about expected stock returns and thus should be considered in strategic asset allocation decisions, especially when the risk-free return is very high or very low compared to its historical average.

Risk-free-return-equity-risk-premium-800x483.png

 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Alto