This article can be seen as a continuation to the previous one. As described in easy words in the article before, standard investment funds tend to have a high correlation in decreasing markets, what means that they also loose quickly in value, as the general market does. Moreover, a great portion of them even underperfoms in raising markets, because of their great sector and country diversification. So there is no need to explain standard investment funds portfolio startegies in a greater detail, it has just to be recognized that they are (even if they wouldn´t charge fees) highly susceptible for downturns in the general markets, what destroys frequently their previous strategy including the generated returns.
Just imprees yourself this chart of the german index Dax (August, 11th, 2011):
Now, look at this funds managed by DWS:
http://www.finanzen.net/fonds/DWS_Vermoegensbildungsfonds_I
http://www.finanzen.net/fonds/DWS_Eurovesta
http://www.finanzen.net/fonds/DWS_European_Opportunities
http://www.finanzen.net/fonds/DWS_PlusInvest_Wachstum
These investment funds are some of there greatest and most popular DWS ones. Especially, take out the “DWS Vermögensbildungsfonds” – every gains having been generated after the mid of 2009 is now destroyed, in a period of approximately 14 days.
There is no doubt that also abolute-return funds cannot in average perform well in such rough times and that they are also affected by such a decrease in world capital markets. But they at least have the potential to generate “absolute returns” and to perform abnormally, independent of other markets and indexes as agaisnt standard investment funds, which are legally doomed to only invest “long” and as a further reason have assumambly not the potential and risk-taking-behavior to elaborate highly complex absolute return strategies. This leads to the simple insight, that mutual funds can generate “enjoyable” returns – maybe sometimes over the general market – but every 3 or 4 years suffer from the general market environment, which is pressed down by some sweeping events (like the september, 11th, 2011; the destruction of Lehman and Bear Stearns or the Fukushima drama at the beginning of 2011) and thus loose almost all, or even more they generated before. If you would take all mutual funds together and average their 11y performance (starting in 2000), I assume, that after having substracted any kind of fees, this would show up an underperformance of the market (refernce – the german Dax) and at least an overall negative performance.
I am justing elaborating on this model and hope to be able to show up some impressive findings soon.
Abolute-return strategies however have completly different possibilities to exploit opportunities in the market. At first, a hedge fund deploying quantitative arbitrage strategies, with a sensefull monitored and considered portion of leverage can exploit a lot of inefficienies in spreads and course differences in different markets. Further more, an actively traded long/short technique is also able (meaning the simple possibility) to generate “easy” returns in such markets, by just changing the major market direction from long to short trades. Last but not least the trading hedge fund, I mentioned in the article before. This version is not a well established in the industry, but I see a great potential in such a startegy. Simply by normal daytrading, based on some rules and strategies, it would be generally very straightforward to profit from the markets. It is therefore indifferent whether the USA are running out of money or Greece defaults on its loans, because every market direction could be traded out equally with the only goal to generate the highest possible return. By some kind of multi-manager construct, the risk and strategy would be greatly diversified and not only depending on only one or two “traders”. Further more, you would assumably erase a beta as well as any other correlation with markets almost entirely, because of the idea of exploiting every (for example) micro trend – indifferent whether it is on a second or a minute level.
