Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

How to 'Stress Test' Your Investment Portfolio

Portfolio / Learning to Invest Aug 10, 2010 - 06:35 AM GMT

By: Money_Morning

Portfolio

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleJack Barnes writes: Back when I was a portfolio manager, I was always looking at ways to "stress test" my portfolio. In other words, I was on the constant lookout for ways to hedge my holdings, guard against risk, and to anticipate anything the market could throw at the stocks, bonds, options and other investments contained in my portfolio.


Hedging involves much more than just anticipating the movements on individual stocks. The financial markets are so deeply interconnected that - to the distant observer - they might appear to be seamless.

To show you what I mean, let's look at oil: It's a great real-world example, ripped right from the daily headlines, and there's a strong emotional component to it, too, since the "black-gold" commodity touches the lives of investors and consumers alike. I'll demonstrate how even retail-level investors can apply this "portfolio-stress-test," risk-management technique to their own portfolios.

Let me give you an example of just how convoluted the markets appear to be. If you are exposed to U.S. crude prices - for example, you're holding a U.S.-based oil refiner like Valero Energy Corp. (NYSE: VLO) - you really need to get a quote for Brent crude and the Argus Sour Crude Index (ASCI).

Brent crude, which is traded in London, tells us what the world market is really paying for the same quantity of essentially equivalent oil. Argus is key because that tells us the price that the United States is paying for Saudi Arabian oil.

The U.S. markets have been - and continue to be - distorted by the capacity of storage available in Cushing, Okla. Cushing is where U.S.-traded commodity contracts are settled. Newcomers are often surprised to discover that one very small city of 8,000 people - which seems to be in the middle of nowhere - sets the price of oil for the U.S. futures market in New York City.

The pipelines into and out of Cushing's tank farms can be affected by a single major refinery being down for repairs -which is precisely what happened in 2008. That closure of a single user of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) - the U.S. benchmark - caused Cushing to fill up with oil, artificially depressing oil prices around the world.

After this event, Saudi Arabia announced that it would no longer trust the WTI price, and would use Argus for its base line going forward. Given that a single refinery distorted global oil prices for months, you can see the Saudis' point.

That's why I began using the "stress-test" technique. Sometimes, a single variable will alter a sector's entire outlook. For an institutional investor, that sort of unanticipated development can savage a portfolio. For a retail investor, such a turn of events can obliterate a nest egg.

Anatomy of a Stress Test
The financial use of the term "stress test" came into vogue after the global financial crisis eviscerated the U.S. banking sector. I'm sure you've heard the term. These high-level "what if" scenarios were designed to provide a much greater degree of banking-system transparency following the near collapse of the financial system. The banks needed to show that they could handle a drop in home prices, or they had to raise capital.

The stress-test result: Of the 19 major U.S banks that were tested, 11 had to raise capital.

Since those public tests in spring of 2009, Europe has stress-tested its banks, and now China is doing the same. In fact, in order to get a true assessment of its national banking system, Beijing reportedly ordered its banks to assume a 60% drop in the real-estate market.

In a nutshell, a stress test is a means of scrutinizing your portfolio holdings, and candidly assessing whether that portfolio could ride out a rough stretch - including a "margin call" that's triggered by a steep drop in value of the assets. While simple to say, it is always different in each case.

For example, if I had a large oil exposure in my stock holdings - but felt that near-term oil prices could or would drop - I would hedge, or offset, the risk by buying a "put" on oil prices, while still permitting my equity positions to react to market conditions.

How do I know this strategy would work? Very simple: I deployed it myself under circumstances very similar to the ones I described here.

And it worked great - just as I anticipated.

The non-margin put position essentially served as "insurance." It helped to hedge my long equity exposure to a drop in its primary component: crude-related investments.

Specifically, in a situation such as this one, I would buy a "short-equivalent" position - out of the money - with a minimum of six to nine months of coverage. As my equity positions moved up in price and value, I continued to buy these types of puts at regular, pre-determined points.

While this "beta future insurance" does represent an expense, meaning that I would be eating into the (alpha) returns of my stock-holdings a bit, these puts positions were never significant from an actual dollar-outlay standpoint.

The only risk was the cost of creating the put position. And if there happened to be another Cushing-like incident, my oil exposure would be nicely hedged.

Adding this put position to my portfolio meant several things to me, all of them important. The put position:

•Helped to limit my overall portfolio risk, meaning that I still had direct exposure to the crude futures market, but without the potentially unlimited risk that a true futures position would represent.
•Enabled me to remain invested in the oil market and to pursue the potential that I see there in the long run - and to benefit from the potentially unlimited volatility based gains that are available during a crash.
One final benefit - and possibly the biggest one of all: Knowing what my portfolio was going to do in most of the key conceivable situations helped me to sleep better at night.

So, how do you apply this technique to your own holdings? Let's take a look.

Stress Testing Your Own Portfolio
Let's begin by posing a short list of questions about your portfolio that you need to answer. Generating those answers will take some time and effort, but the energy that you expend here could save you a small fortune in unnecessary losses down the road.

Here are the questions:

◦Is my portfolio diversified in terms of exposure?
◦Is my portfolio hedged to cover losses - or even to make money - if the market moves against my key holdings?
◦If I'm not hedged, and I opt to "stand pat" (make no changes), what is the absolute worst thing that could happen to my portfolio?
◦What can I do to protect my portfolio, or even to make money, if I address the deficiencies discovered by answering question No. 3?
Let's answer each of these questions, to illustrate the thinking that's involved in mentally "stress-testing" your own portfolio. Take a look:

■Is my portfolio diversified? In simple terms, what percentage of your holdings is in cash, stocks, bonds and physical assets? Ratios such as 10%, 50%, 30% and 10% are used to evaluate your total holdings - and your exposure. These can change - and they will - as you seek to maximize growth, or income at different times in your life. When you define your "portfolio," make sure that you include all your holdings. Investors will too often exclude their IRA accounts or 401(k) accounts from this exercise - and don't see the big exposure risk they have as a result.
■Is my portfolio hedged to cover losses - or even to make money - if the market moves against my key holdings? Addressing this question can be as simple as buying puts in your personal account on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, should you discover that you have a large S&P 500 exposure in your 401(k). If you own a lot of Valero, and believe that a run-up in oil prices would hurt the refiner's results, you could buy "calls" on the United States Oil Fund LP (NYSE: USO) exchange-traded fund (ETF). If you are experiencing near-term weakness in some of your core holdings, you could write some very-near-term "covered calls" against those holdings to fund put purchases. This way your investment is hedging itself in the near term.
■If I'm not hedged, and I opt to "stand pat" (make no changes), what is the absolute worst thing that could happen to my portfolio? Sometimes, investors are afflicted with "deer-in-the-headlights" syndrome. This is when the market goes against you, and you know it, but you freeze - and get run over. And be honest when you answer this question.
■What can I do to protect my portfolio, or even to make money, if I address the deficiencies discovered by answering question No. 3? Can you buy a small position opposite to how your portfolio is leaning, to hedge that risk? Can you employ some of the investments that we detailed in answering question No. 2 to actually generate some income or capital gains for the portfolio?Actions to Take: In the turbulent market conditions of today - with "flash crashes" a newfound reality - take the time to administer a "stress test" to your personal investment portfolio. Your objective is to see how your portfolio will handle a major change in market conditions.

For example, if you are heavily exposed to a specific commodity, what would happen if the price of that basic commodity dropped by 50% in a period of weeks? If you are short a commodity, what would happen if it went up 50% or 100% in a month?

Are you are a bond investor? What would happen if interest rates started to rise significantly, as the world tires of buying U.S. Treasury bonds?

If you are heavily invested in S&P 500 stocks, what would happen if that key U.S. index re-tested the painful lows of March 2009 once again?

My suggestion is to conduct the investment self-review that we've outlined for you in the preceding essay. Once you've done that portfolio assessment, I suggest that you may want to consider pairing some shorter-term ETF options to hedge your long-term exposure to the markets.

Source : http://moneymorning.com/2010/08/10/stress-test/

Money Morning/The Money Map Report

©2010 Monument Street Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Protected by copyright laws of the United States and international treaties. Any reproduction, copying, or redistribution (electronic or otherwise, including on the world wide web), of content from this website, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without the express written permission of Monument Street Publishing. 105 West Monument Street, Baltimore MD 21201, Email: customerservice@moneymorning.com

Disclaimer: Nothing published by Money Morning should be considered personalized investment advice. Although our employees may answer your general customer service questions, they are not licensed under securities laws to address your particular investment situation. No communication by our employees to you should be deemed as personalized investent advice. We expressly forbid our writers from having a financial interest in any security recommended to our readers. All of our employees and agents must wait 24 hours after on-line publication, or 72 hours after the mailing of printed-only publication prior to following an initial recommendation. Any investments recommended by Money Morning should be made only after consulting with your investment advisor and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company.

Money Morning Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in