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Research

Beyond Currency Hedging

  • This paper seeks to rethink common industry practices around currency hedging and currency exposure for global multi-asset portfolios.
  • For most institutional investors with multi-asset portfolios, currency exposures are often a by-product of static, “rule of thumb” hedging rules.
  • This approach, however, constrains potential currency exposure due to arbitrary tilts such as the regional market capitalization of underlying asset classes. It fails to exploit the potential return and risk diversification benefits of currencies.
  • We considered this an opportunity to improve portfolio efficiency by seeking to treat currency as its own asset class in the broader portfolio construction problem.
  • Using our proprietary currency valuation model to estimate ex ante currency return expectations, we were able to increase returns on our hypothetical global 60/40 portfolios over our sample period while controlling for overall portfolio risk, equity beta and currency exposure tolerance, compared with traditional hedging practices.
  • These potential performance gains could be meaningful in their own right but have the potential to be particularly significant in today’s low yield environment.

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