Key points
- Dynamic allocation across global bonds, global equities, gold and cash
- Provides convexity through a higher participation rate in bull markets and a lower participation rate in bear markets
- Disciplined, momentum-based investment philosophy: keep the winners and sell the losers
- Invest in liquid financial instruments: mainly exchange-traded funds
- Both UBAM - Asymmetry 50 subfunds help enhance the efficiency of a portfolio, be it a diversified, bond- or equity-only portfolio
Investment case
Prices of financial assets, which reflect the collective investment decisions of all financial players, exhibit trends that can last long enough to be captured with a profit by a momentum-based investment process.
To benefit from assets’ price momentum, two elements are key:
- systematically screening a broadly diversified investment universe of global assets so as to detect and track current trends; and
- dynamically adjusting a portfolio’s exposure to capture these trends.
Disciplined implementation of these key elements generates an asymmetric (convex) risk/ return profile: a portfolio applying such a convex strategy allocates more weight to assets with a positive price momentum and, crucially, cuts exposure to assets with falling prices.
Fund concept
Both UBAM - Asymmetry 50 sub-funds offer exposure to global equity and bond markets: portfolio weights are dynamically adjusted favouring market segments with the strongest price momentum in absolute (increasing prices) and relative (prices increasing more than others) terms. Over a market cycle, both UBAM - Asymmetry 50 sub-funds target a higher participation rate in bull markets and a lower one in bear markets.
Reducing the participation in bear markets has a genuine base effect – as a 50% drop needs a 100% increase to break even – that leaves more capital to take advantage of market rises: as a matter of fact, avoiding large drawdowns, coupled with regular participation in rising markets, improves the risk-adjusted performance and hence portfolio efficiency.
