ALLOCATING TO LESS LIQUID ASSET CLASSES
Learning Outcome
discuss asset class liquidity considerations in asset allocation
Large institutional investors have the ability to invest in less liquid asset classes, such as direct real estate, infrastructure, and private equity. These less liquid asset classes represent unique challenges to many of the common asset allocation techniques, such as meanâvariance optimization.
For traditional, highly liquid asset classes, such as publicly listed equities and bonds, almost all of the major index providers have indexes that do an outstanding job of representing the performance characteristics of the asset class (and its various subâasset classes). For example, over any reasonably long time period, the risk and return characteristics of a given asset class are nearly identical across the major global equity indexes and the correlations between the returns of the indexes are close to 1. Additionally, in most cases, there are passive, low-cost investment vehicles that allow investors to capture the performance of the asset class with very little tracking error.
Cash, the Risk-Free Asset, and Liquidity Needs
The so called ârisk-free assetâ has a special and somewhat tricky spot in the world of finance. Asset allocators typically use indexes for either 30-day or 90-day government bills to represent the characteristics associated with holding cash, which they may or may not treat as the risk-free asset. The volatility associated with these total return indexes is extremely low, but it isnât zero. An alternative to using a cash index as a proxy for the risk-free asset is to use a government bond with a duration/maturity that matches the time horizon of the investor. Some asset allocators like to include cash or another asset that could be considered a risk-free asset in the optimization and to allow the optimizer to determine how to mix it with the other asset classes included in the optimization. Other asset allocators prefer to exclude the risk-free asset from the optimization and allow real-world needs, such as liquidity needs, to determine how much to allocate to cash-like assets.
Illiquid assets may offer an expected return premium as compensation for illiquidity as well as diversification benefits. Determining an appropriate allocation to these assets is associated with various challenges, however. Common illiquid asset classes cannot be readily diversified to eliminate idiosyncratic risk, so representing an overall asset class performance is problematic. Furthermore, for less liquid asset classes, such as direct real estate, infrastructure, and private equity, there are, in general, far fewer indexes that attempt to represent aggregate performance. If one were to compare the performance characteristics of multiple indexes representing one of these less liquid asset classes, there would be noticeable risk and return differences, suggesting that it is difficult to accurately measure the risk and return characteristics of these asset classes. Also, due to the illiquid nature of the constituents that make up these asset classes, it is widely believed that the indexes donât accurately reflect their true volatility. In contrast to the more traditional, highly liquid asset classes, there are no low-cost passive investment vehicles that would allow investors to closely track the aggregate performance of these less liquid asset classes.
Thus, the problem is twofold: (1) Due to the lack of accurate indexes, it is more challenging to make capital market assumptions for these less liquid asset classes, and (2) even if there were accurate indexes, there are no low-cost passive investment vehicles to track them.
Compounding the asset allocatorâs dilemma is the fact that the risk and return characteristics associated with actual investment vehicles, such as direct real estate funds, infrastructure funds, and private equity funds, are typically significantly different from the characteristics of the asset classes themselves. For example, the private equity âasset classâ should represent the risk and return characteristics of owning all private equity, just as the MSCI All Country World Index represents the risk and return characteristics of owning all public equity. Purchasing the exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the MSCI All Country World Index completely diversifies public company-specific risk. This scenario is in direct contrast to the typical private equity fund, in which the risk and return characteristics are often dominated by company-specific (idiosyncratic) risk.
In addressing asset allocation involving less liquid asset classes, practical options include the following:
Exclude less liquid asset classes (direct real estate, infrastructure, and private equity) from the asset allocation decision and then consider real estate funds, infrastructure funds, and private equity funds as potential implementation vehicles when fulfilling the target strategic asset allocation.
Include less liquid asset classes in the asset allocation decision and attempt to model the inputs to represent the specific risk characteristics associated with the likely implementation vehicles.
Include less liquid asset classes in the asset allocation decision and attempt to model the inputs to represent the highly diversified characteristics associated with the true asset classes.
Related to this last option, some practitioners use listed real estate indexes, listed infrastructure, and public equity indexes that are deemed to have characteristics similar to their private equity counterparts to help estimate the risk of the less liquid asset classes and their correlation with the other asset classes in the opportunity set. It should be noted that the use of listed alternative indexes often violates the recommendation that asset classes be mutually exclusiveâthe securities in these indexes are likely also included in indexes representing other asset classesâand thus typically results in higher correlations among different asset classes, which has the negative impact of increasing input sensitivity in most optimization settings.
For investors who do not have access to direct real estate funds, infrastructure funds, and private equity fundsâfor example, small investorsâthe most common approach is to use one of the indexes based on listed equities to represent the asset class and then to implement the target allocation with a fund that invests similarly. Thus global REITs might be used to represent (approximately) global real estate.
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