INTECH Investment Management LLC (INTECH) has launched a suite of absolute volatility equity strategies, offering institutional investors the potential for both equity-like and above-market returns, at lower volatility than is associated with capitalization-weighted equity indexes.
These new strategies, Low Volatility and Managed Volatility, can be benchmarked to the Russell 1000 and MSCI World Indexes.
INTECH’s Low Volatility strategies seek to generate modest returns in excess of their respective cap-weighted benchmarks, over time, at significantly lower levels of absolute volatility and higher Sharpe Ratios. INTECH’s Managed Volatility strategies seek to generate more-aggressive returns in excess of their respective cap-weighted benchmarks, over time, at lower levels of absolute volatility and substantially higher Sharpe Ratios.
The main difference between INTECH’s suite of absolute volatility strategies and its other actively managed strategies is that the optimisation process of the absolute volatility strategies attempts to minimise the portfolios’ standard deviation rather than its tracking error. These strategies represent a natural evolution of INTECH’s mathematical investment process.
“INTECH is introducing this suite of absolute volatility strategies to serve the needs of investors who are not necessarily constrained to keeping tracking error low relative to a cap-weighted index, but find lower absolute volatility and high Sharpe Ratios attractive,” says Jennifer Young (pictured), CFA, President and Co-CEO of INTECH. “These strategies present an attractive option for investors who desire either equity-like returns or above-market returns at lower levels of absolute risk.”
INTECH’s Co-Chief Investment Officer, Adrian Banner, PhD, says: “As is the case with all of INTECH’s products, these new strategies are managed using stock-price volatility and the correlation between stocks in an attempt to generate a return above the capitalisation-weighted benchmark over the long term. Our mathematical process strongly relies on estimates of volatilities and correlation for both alpha generation and risk control. INTECH has considerable experience in managing portfolios based on estimates of volatility and correlations as applied to our volatility-capture process going back to 1987. In this case, we have simply extended the process to the analysis of absolute as well as relative volatility.”
INTECH’s new absolute volatility strategies complement its existing product line of actively managed large-cap US equity, global and international equity and long/short equity strategies, as well as its passive-alternative strategy and custom investment-solutions platform.
