Hobbled by Benchmarks

Abstract

In 2003, at the NMS Endowments and Foundations Conference, Peter Bernstein suggested that policy portfolios are overused, leading to excessive tracking-error constraints. In a 2004 article in this journal, Rob Arnott showed that the 20 largest U.S. corporate pension funds were willing to accept 12% annual volatility in total return, 15% volatility relative to liabilities, but only 2.5% tracking error relative to peers. Today, the use of policy portfolios is as dominant as it was 15 years ago; policy portfolios and their respective benchmarks continue to be a largely home-centric 60/40 allocation. In the view of the authors, there should be no debate on the benefits of broadly (i.e., globally) diversified policy portfolios. Broad diversification is a requirement for actively adding value over time. The authors believe that long-only investors can translate the lightly correlated sources of excess returns from the long–short space to their portfolios. They hope that investors will hear their plea: Please diversify your benchmarks.