Designing Low-Volatility Strategies

Since the Global Financial Crisis hit in 2008, low volatility has garnered increased attention from institutional investors. In this article, the authors delve into the practicalities of low-volatility investing, including construction issues, their performance in different market regimes, and the effect of recent increased demand on the strategy’s behavior. They discuss that although heuristic approaches tend to be simpler, only optimization-based approaches can take full advantage of the correlation between stocks. Constraints are essential in creating a well-behaved and investable low-volatility index. The authors show how different constraints can improve a minimum volatility strategy without having a significant impact on its volatility. Via attribution analyses, they analyze the sources of long-term outperformance of a minimum volatility index and discuss the valuation of minimum volatility indexes after the recent increases in demand and outperformance.