Industry Insights Posts

“Dow 20,000”

Those two words encapsulate three concepts: 1) the Dow is a relevant economic indicator; 2) 20,000 is a noteworthy milestone; 3) special consideration should be given to investing at all-time highs.  I’ll examine each in turn...

New Frontier Advisors creates and maintains diversified investment solutions for long-term wealth accumulation and preservation. Clients and advisors often raise concerns about individual assets or asset classes held in these portfolios – concerns that are based on looking at the performance, or attempting to assess the potential dangers, of those...

Given great interest in the DOL decision on fiduciary responsibility, we note a blog posted in 2012 by James Watkins that referenced New Frontier’s patented optimization process followed by a comment by noted expert Steve Winks that we quote below: “…[T]here is massive push back from the brokerage industry, which neither acknowledges nor supports the fiduciary standing of brok ...

Mutual funds are often touted as the most effective and convenient tools for individual investors and managers to build diversified portfolios.

However, investor experience is often...

Question: U. S. Equity markets are up. Why isn’t all of my money in the S&P 500? Why do I have any exposure to treasuries when everybody knows they are underperforming U. S. equities? At the heart of New Frontier’s investment policy is planning for all contingencies and reducing portfolio risk. It may be fashionable to bet strongly on particular outcomes, but a sensible lo ...

Fixed income funds have many important functions in global capital markets.  Life insurance companies may buy long-term bonds to hedge long-term life insurance policies.  Commercial insurance companies may purchase intermediate-term bonds to hedge various shorter-term liabilities.  Pension funds may buy various maturity bond funds to match vested retirement liabilities. Central ...

Risk parity strategies gained a lot of attention in the post-2008 world of investment products. In a fit of defensive anxiety, investors flocked to products based on methods which purportedly would have lost less during the crisis. A recent Wall Street Journal article claims that “Assets in risk-parity mutual funds totaled $15.1 billion at the end of May, up from $73.6 million ...

Most traditional optimizers have two inputs – mean and variance. In fact, most portfolio optimization frameworks pit some notion of return against some notion of risk. The conventional wisdom in the finance practitioner community is that high quality, accurate estimates are available for the risk inputs, whereas the expected return estimates are highly proprietary and subject t ...

Since their co-founding in 2010 by New Frontier Advisors and the Journal Of Investment Management (JOIM), the annual Harry M. Markowitz Awards continue to recognize the transcendental impact of the work of Nobel Prize winner Markowitz as a financial economist and mathematician — with particular emphasis on theoretical finance and innovation in the practice of asset management.

When evaluating new investment portfolios, the use of backtesting to justify portfolio construction and trading methods is a common marketing tool among many firms. Backtesting is a traditional way of saying that a proposed investment strategy would have worked in the past, and that it would likely be successful in the future. That assumption, however, is very contentious from several perspectives.