Investing Risk

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Allocation Advice for Betterment Portfolios
Unlike the risk questionnaires, our algorithm weights investment time horizon and downside ...
Allocation Advice for Betterment Portfolios Unlike the risk questionnaires, our algorithm weights investment time horizon and downside risk more heavily, and allows you to deviate from our advice if you want to deviate. TABLE OF CONTENTS We start with your goals How we balance risk and time How we manage downside risk The result? Betterment's glide path Including customer risk preference If you have ever worked with a traditional investment manager or have a 401(k) plan at work, you have likely answered a “standard” risk questionnaire. It often starts with your estimated retirement date and how much money you have, and then ask you what kind of returns you want to see. But these questionnaires measure what kind of risk-taker you think you are, not what kind you need to be in order to achieve your goals. At Betterment, we believe that your investment horizon—how long until you will need your money—is one of the most important determinants of how much risk you should take. The more long-term your investing goals, the more risk you can afford to safely take. Money saved for short- and medium-term goals, such as saving for a house or buying a car, can be invested at a different risk level than a longer-term goal, such as retirement. Another consideration is how you plan to use the money when you need it. Will you take out the investment in a lump sum or will you gradually make withdrawals over time and use that money for income? These are key pieces of information we use when providing personalized investment advice. Below, we walk you through the rationale of our risk advice model. Unlike the standard risk questionnaires, our algorithm weights investment time horizon and downside risk more heavily, and allows you to deviate from our advice if you want to deviate. This is the heart of Betterment's risk advice algorithm. We start with your goals First, let's talk about goals. At Betterment, you can think of goals like different investment buckets. They are technically subaccounts that you can use to silo your retirement savings from vacation savings, for example. Every goal you set up at Betterment (and every customer can set up several) will have its own customized allocation of stocks and bonds. Each goal has different final liquidation assumptions, so it is important to select the one that most closely matches your real intentions. Below we can see the diversity of goals you can manage at Betterment. ...and then look at your investment horizon. Once we know your goal, we next consider how long you will be invested in that goal, as well as the withdrawal plan for that goal. Is it a goal that you plan on cashing out in 10 years, or a goal such as retirement in 30 years, give or take a few years? That actually makes a big difference in the advice we'll give. We assume you will spend your Major Purchase goal savings at a specific point in time. You might withdraw your entire House goal investment after 10 years when you have hit the savings mark for your down payment. In contrast, with a Retirement goal, we assume you will spend funds over a number of years rather than in one lump sum withdrawal. That's the nature of a nest egg—it's the basis for your monthly income in retirement. If you don’t have a specific investment horizon or target amount, we will use your age to set your investment horizon (our default target date is your 65th birthday) in a General Investing goal. It has a similar spending assumption as retirement, but maintains a slightly riskier portfolio even when you hit the target date, since it's not clear you'll liquidate those investments soon. With this information about your time horizon and goals, we can determine an optimal risk level for your investment horizon. We do this by assessing the possible outcomes for your time horizon across a wide variety of bad to average markets. Getting to an optimal risk level, generally attained through exposure to stocks versus bonds, involves weighing the trade-offs between potential gains from higher risk investments and the potential for falling short by playing it safe. We have designed our formula so that it works especially well with our portfolio, which contains multiple globally diversified asset classes. Now, we know we can't predict what the future will be. So we use a projection model that includes this uncertainty by including many possible futures, weighted by how likely we believe they are. We use these probability-weighted futures to build our recommendation based on a range of outcomes, giving slightly more weight to potential negative outcomes and building in a margin of safety—which technically is called 'downside risk' and uncertainty optimization. If you're interested, you can also read more about our projection methodology. Paying particular attention to below-average scenarios we are able to select a level of risk that aims to minimize potential downside risk at every investment horizon. By some standards, we have a fairly conservative allocation model—but as we mentioned above, our mission is to help you get to your goal through steady saving and appropriate allocation, rather than taking on unnecessary risk. How we balance risk and time Now, let's consider now how risk and time work together. The example below shows the forecasted growth of $100,000 in a 70% stock portfolio over three years. The expected return, or median outcome, for this portfolio is $121,917, but the range of possible outcomes moves from at least $180,580 for the top 5% of potential outcomes to no better than $82,312 for the bottom 5%. This is a great example of how stocks can bring both a lot of upside—as well as downside in the short-term. Outcome and risk over a three-year term If the graph above shows an example of the predicted volatility that stocks can bring to very short-term time horizons, what happens to the same portfolio over a 10-year time horizon? Outcome and risk over a 10-year term After 10 years, our models predict that you are less likely to lose money and more likely to come out ahead on an absolute dollar basis. How we manage downside risk Now that the relationship between risk and time is clear, let's turn back to allocation. In order to make an appropriate recommendation of stocks and bonds, we have to look at potential outcomes for everything from 0% stocks to 100% stocks. To do this, we evaluate stock allocations and look at how they might perform at similar percentiles over a fixed investment horizon. This analysis helps us finely tune the stock-and-bond ratio. In the example below, we see the 15th percentile outcome for every stock allocation over a 20-year investment horizon. We use the 15th percentile to represent a 'bad' outcome, i.e., poor predicted market performance. With shorter-term horizons (seven years and less), our modeling shows a majority bond portfolio beats a majority stock portfolio in this ‘bad case.' However, by year 12, the same model predicts higher stock allocations begin to overcome bond-heavy portfolios. By year 20 all majority stock portfolios (at least 50.1%) have better outcomes than majority bond portfolios, even though this is still a 'bad' outcome in terms of investment performance. Returns at the 15th percentile, or a 'bad case' scenario Within this bad outcome scenario let's focus on the best allocation at each time period. Measured by returns, the best expected outcomes are equivalent to the top of this graph (traced in red). Another way to view this best allocation line is to change the y-axis from absolute value in dollars to the stock allocation. If we plot the same 15th percentile best allocation line on a new plot we get the following graph. Portfolio value as a measure of stock allocation at the 15th percentile This new view of the same line clearly shows which allocation would have performed best for a given period. For example, in the ‘bad’ scenario, a 65% stock portfolio would have performed best over a period that lasted 10 years and nine months on the predicted model. Allocation and time Our advice doesn’t only consider the bad outcomes. We seek to find the best stock allocation for outcomes from the expected 50th percentile to the 5th percentile (a 'worst case' scenario, but not THE worst case scenario). You can see the result of this exercise in the graph below, which maps investment horizon against best stock allocation, given the percentile chosen. Percentiles by 5%, from 5th to 50th Our goal is to provide the best possible expected returns. That means aiming to provide you with the best chance of making money and not losing it. To do that, we then must look at the the median outcome—and an average of all the outcomes that are considered bad, which is everything from the 5th percentile to the 50th. (Why 50th? Percentiles over the 50th, the median will show that 100% stocks are the best allocation.) The dark blue line represents the average ‘best’ stock allocation across all percentiles. Since we have included more downside scenarios in this average, it weighs the potential for loss more than equivalent upside. But note that over longer time periods, even with a downside risk focus, we predict that it is still better to be in a majority stock portfolio compared to a majority bond portfolio. Average of all percentiles For long-term goals, those with time horizons over 20 years or more, we recommend 90% stocks. For short-term time horizons, we recommend 10% stocks. And for intermediate-term goals, the recommended stock allocation rises very quickly. This is based on a conservative downside-weighted risk measure which accounts for your specific time horizon in each goal to help ensure you are taking on the right risk for the level of return you should realize. The result is Betterment's glide path The result is a general framework for the risk allocation advice Betterment uses across all goals, which can supply a goal-specific glide path recommendation. In investing, a glide path is the formula used for asset allocation that progressively gets more and more conservative as the liquidation date nears. Many retirement-oriented target-date funds are based on a glide path (though every firm has its own formula.) At Betterment, we adjust the recommended allocation and portfolio weights of the glide path based on your specific goal and time horizon. This means Betterment glide path recommendations are more personalized to your specific goals and investment horizons. For example, in our Major Purchase goals, shown below, the recommended glide path takes a more conservative path than a recommended retirement glide path—moving to near-zero risk—for very short time horizons. Why is that? This is because we expect that you will fully liquidate your investment at the intended date and will need the full balance. With Retirement goals, in contrast, the glide path we recommend remains at a higher risk allocation even when the target date is reached, as we assume liquidation will be gradual, and you still have years in retirement for your investments to grow before they are liquidated. Learn how this advice varies by goal type. Mixing bonds and stocks across percentiles The bottom line: Our allocation advice is designed at a goal level to help ensure you're taking on the right level of risk based on your personal situation, unlike the impersonal and often unexplained glide path offered by target-date funds. Including customer risk preference How should we modify this analysis for a conservative or aggressive approach? The glidepath derived above is downside optimized because it gives equal weight to each percentile outcome from the median down to the first percentile over a given time horizon. To tailor this guidance to a more conservative or aggressive approach, we’ll change the weights to reflect the degree to which investors care about the worse outcomes versus median average outcomes. A quantitative approach We’ll define a ‘conservative’ approach as giving the median (50th percentile outcome) about 40% of the weight of the 5th percentile outcome. Conversely, the ‘aggressive’ approach gives the 5th percentile outcome about 40% of the weight of the median. Weight Given to Outcome for Different Approaches The result is a set of optimal aggressive and conservative glidepaths, as shown below for a major purchase goal. Deviation from the Recommended Approach This approach does allow for deviation by risk level, which produces a non-linear guidance range. It is wider at moderate allocations, and tighter at the bottom and top of the risk range. Optimal Stock Allocation One reason is simply mechanical: at higher risk levels, you can’t deviate up very much. At lower risk levels, you can’t deviate down much. Taken across the entire range our outcomes, we have determined that ± 7% is a reasonable deviation. We believe a stable range across recommended levels is easier to understand and follow, and there is sufficient noise in the more extreme tails of these estimates to justify allowing a higher range at the tails. We therefore give guidance that the acceptable range of deviation is -7% for customers wanting a conservative approach, and +7% for customers wanting an aggressive approach to that goal. Very conservative More than 7% beneath recommendation Appropriately Conservative Between 3% and 7% beneath recommendation Moderate Within 3% of recommendation, inclusive. Appropriately Aggressive Between 3% and 7% above recommendation Too aggressive ✢ More than 7% above recommendation Unknown When lack of information regarding significant external assets means it’s not possible to reach a conclusive opinion ✢ Betterment for Advisors customers see ‘Very aggressive’ instead. Goal-term guidance Our quantitative approach above allows us to establish a set of recommended risk ranges given our goals. However, an investor may choose to deviate from our risk guidance if they see fit, and there may be appropriate reasons for those deviations. That being said, we provide investors with feedback regarding the potential implications of such deviations and, in doing so, we treat upwards and downwards deviations differently. If an investor decides to take on more risk than we recommend, we communicate the fact that we believe their approach is “too aggressive” given their goal and time horizon. We flag this because even in a setting where an investor cares about the downsides less than the average outcome, it still isn’t rational to take on more risk (viewing this particular goal in isolation). If the investor is unlucky with returns over that period, the losses in a portfolio flagged as “too aggressive” will be very difficult to recover from. In contrast, if an investor chooses a risk level lower than our “conservative” band, we'll communicate that their choice is “very conservative.” This is because the downside of taking on a lower risk level in a moderate outcome scenario is simply needing to save more. And we believe investors should choose a level of risk which is aligned with their ability to stay the course through the short term. Aligning risk level with short-term risk tolerance An allocation cannot be optimal if the investor is not comfortable committing to it in both good markets and bad ones. As a point of reference, our 70% stock portfolio would have lost 46% from Nov. 2007 to Mar. 2009, and been in the red until 2011. While this performance would have been very disappointing, it is important to remember we only recommend 70% stock allocations for goals expected to be held eight years or longer. To ensure that investors understand and feel comfortable with the short term risk in their portfolios, we present them with both extremely good and extremely poor return scenarios for their selection over a one-year time period. -
3 Low-Risk Ways To Earn Interest
Earning interest usually means taking on risk. But with bonds, cash accounts, and compound ...
3 Low-Risk Ways To Earn Interest Earning interest usually means taking on risk. But with bonds, cash accounts, and compound interest, you can keep that risk as low as possible. In 1 minute When you don’t have much time to reach your goal, you can’t afford to make a risky investment. Thankfully, you can earn interest without putting everything on the line. Here’s how. Bonds Bonds are one of the most common types of financial assets. They represent loans, which a business or the government uses to pay for projects and other costs. Just as you pay interest when you take out a loan, bonds pay investors interest.You’ll typically see lower returns than you might with stocks, but the risk is generally lower, too. Cash accounts Cash accounts are similar to traditional savings accounts, only they are designed to earn more interest (and may come with more restrictions). These are great when you need your money to be readily available to you, but still want to earn some interest. And to top it off, many cash accounts are offered at or through banks so your deposits are FDIC insured, so there’s minimal risk. Compound interest The longer you invest, the more time you have to earn compound interest. This is the interest you earn and the interest your interest earns. That’s right. As you accrue interest, that interest makes money and that money in turn makes more money. The more frequently your interest compounds, the more you can earn. In 5 minutes Want to earn interest? You usually have to take some risk which means you could lose some money. Financial assets can gain or lose value over time. And investments that have the potential to earn greater interest often come with the risk of greater losses. But there are ways to lower your risk. If you have a short-term financial goal or you’re just cautious, you can still earn interest. It might not be much, but it will be more than you’d get keeping cash under your mattress (don’t do that). In this guide, we’ll look at: Bonds Cash accounts Compound interest Bonds Bonds are basically loans. Companies and governments use loans to fund their operations or special projects. A bond lets investors help fund (and reap the financial benefits of) these loans. They’re known as a “fixed income” asset because your investment earns interest based on a schedule and matures on a specific date. Bonds are generally lower-risk investments than stocks. The main risks associated with bonds are that interest rates can change, and companies can go bankrupt. Still, these are typically fairly stable investments (depending on the type of bond and credit quality of the issuer), making them ideal for a short-term goal. With municipal bonds, you can earn tax-free interest. These bonds fund government projects, and in return for the favor, the government doesn’t tax them. Invest in your own state, and you could avoid federal and state taxes. Even when your goal is years away, including bonds in your investment portfolio can be a smart way to lower your risk and diversify your investments. Learn more about how earning interest and bond income works at Betterment. Cash accounts Cash accounts seek to earn more interest than a standard savings or checking account, and they’re federally insured by the FDIC or NCUA. (This is usually the case but depends on the institution housing your deposits (i.e., banks or credit unions). Check to make sure your account is insured before depositing any money.) In most cases, there’s little risk of losing your principal. Your interest is based on the annual percentage yield (APY) promised by the bank or financial institution you open the account with. One of the great perks of a cash account is that it’s highly liquid—so you can use your money when you want. It won’t earn as much interest as an investment, but it won’t be as tied up when you need it. For short-term financial goals, a cash account works just fine. The key is to choose an account that meets your needs. Pay attention to things like minimum deposits, transaction limits, fees, and compound frequency (that’s often how it accrues interest). These differences affect how fast your savings will actually grow and how freely you can use it. Compound interest Compound interest refers to two things: The interest your investments or savings earn The interest your interest earns It’s your money making more money. If you want to build wealth for the long-term, investing and allowing your interest to compound is one of the smartest moves you can make. The sooner you invest and put your money to work, the more you can expect to have down the road. Compound interest starts small, but it grows exponentially. Over the course of decades, it can easily become hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on how much you invest upfront. Your investment grows faster because your interest starts earning interest, too. If you start young, you have a huge advantage: time is on your side! The graph below shows that if you invest over time, compound interest can grow your portfolio much quicker than just saving cash over time. With interest, you need to know how often it compounds. There’s a huge difference between interest that compounds daily, monthly, and annually. The more frequently it compounds, the more interest you earn. -
The Recommended Allocation To Keep Up With Inflation Has Changed
For funds that seek to match or beat inflation, like a Safety Net goal or Emergency goal, we ...
The Recommended Allocation To Keep Up With Inflation Has Changed For funds that seek to match or beat inflation, like a Safety Net goal or Emergency goal, we seek to take on minimal risk while allowing your portfolio the potential growth needed to keep up with inflation. Learn about our updated portfolio allocation recommendations for your emergency funds. At Betterment, we are routinely evaluating our investment strategies to help you achieve your financial goals. As part of that routine evaluation process, we have recently updated our recommended portfolio allocation for goals that seek to keep up with inflation. Goals like our Safety Net goal or an emergency fund are designed to be an account you can withdraw from in the case of an unexpected financial situation, such as a large medical bill or the loss of a job. If your emergency money is sitting out of the market and it’s not invested, it runs the risk of losing buying power over time because of inflation. A key risk to this money is that it loses purchasing power as time goes on. A key aim for such goals is to match—or beat—inflation, so that your dollars can keep as much buying power over time as possible. We updated our recommended allocation for goals that seek to keep up with inflation from 15% stocks to 30% stocks. Based on updated analysis below that considers the current yield curve and inflation expectations, our recommendation is that a 30% stock portfolio is the appropriate allocation for your emergency funds. The chosen allocation is designed to match our assumptions regarding long term inflation. We revisit these assumptions annually, and our assumption for long term inflation is still 2%. As interest rates have moved lower, the yield on low asset assets has also gone down. Now, an investor must take slightly more risk to achieve a return that may beat inflation. Just as they have in the past, these economic conditions could change again in the future—which is why we routinely evaluate our strategies over time. Keeping Inflation At Bay In order to determine the right level of portfolio risk, we need two key pieces of information: The expected return of the portfolio The expected rate of inflation Our current inflation assumption is 2% per year. We review our inflation assumptions annually to make sure they reflect the current economic environment, which is always changing. The expected return of the portfolio has two key components: the risk-free rate and the expected return on risky assets. Yield on U.S. Treasury bonds determines the risk-free rate. Since U.S. Treasury bonds are backed by the U.S. government, they are considered to be virtually risk-free. We also estimate how much additional return we might expect from holding risky assets, such as stocks or corporate bonds. Putting these two pieces together gives us the total expected return for the portfolio. As of January 2021, short-term U.S. Treasury bonds were expected to have a 0.10% annual yield. This means that holding these bonds until they mature will produce about a 0.10% annualized return, which is less than the 2% we need in order to combat inflation, based on our current inflation assumptions. By taking slightly more risk, Betterment seeks to improve on the 0.10% risk-free investment return. Based on our asset class return assumptions, we expect that the total returns for our 30% stock portfolio could potentially be 2.1% after fees*, which is slightly higher than our inflation expectations. We Recommend A Buffer Unfortunately, we can’t predict the future, so the actual performance of our 30% stock portfolio may turn out to be different than our projected assumptions. We can use history to help us understand the range of potential outcomes. Our 30% stock portfolio’s worst performance in a historical backtest would have been -22.9%, during the Great Financial Crisis.** To help protect against a temporary market drop, we recommend that you hold an additional buffer that’s 30% of your target amount—which generally represents at least three months of normal expenses—to insulate against down markets. For example, if three months of expenses is $10,000, we recommend that you hold $13,000 in our goal. Why not just hold cash? Finally, you might be wondering, “Why not just use a bank account for my emergency funds?” It’s a valid question. After all, money in a checking or savings account isn’t subject to market volatility. Most traditional bank accounts don’t pay a high enough interest rate to keep up with inflation. The national average interest rate is 0.04%, which is far below the 2% annual return we need in order to simply match inflation. This means that even though the amount of cash you’re holding is stable, its buying power is still declining over time. We’ll help keep you on track while keeping you informed. Having funds set aside for emergencies is the cornerstone of any financial plan, since it provides an important cushion against unforeseen circumstances—circumstances that might otherwise require you to dip into a long term account, such as retirement. In fact, our advisors routinely recommend that the first investing goal our customers set up should be a goal to protect oneself against unexpected costs, like a medical bill, or loss of income. If you currently have a goal that’s set to the target allocation of our old recommendation—15% stocks—we’ll alert you that your allocation is now considered conservative, and that a more appropriate target allocation for your goal is now 30% stocks. While we won’t adjust your target allocation for you, you’ll be able to adjust your target allocation within your goal either on a web browser or on your mobile app. Before making this update, please note that there may be a tax impact. We’ll show you the estimated tax impact before you complete the change inside of your account. As the economic environment changes, we will continue to review our recommendations. Because we believe in transparency, we’ll keep our customers updated if economic condition shifts lead to a chance in our advice and recommendations. We calculate expected excess returns for the assets in our portfolio by applying a Black-Litterman model, as described in “Computing Forward-Looking Return Inputs” of our . By multiplying these expected returns by our portfolio weights, we can calculate the gross expected excess returns for the portfolio. We can then calculate the expected total return of the portfolio by adding to the expected excess return our estimate of the forward-looking risk-free rate. In this example, we used the lowest point on the US Treasury yield curve as our assumption. The expected returns are net of a 0.25% annual management fee and fund level expenses, and assumes reinvestment of dividends.This expected return is based on a model, rather than actual client performance. Model returns may not always reflect material market or economic factors. All investing involves risk, and there is always a chance for loss, as well as gain. Actual returns can vary. Past performance does not indicate future results. ** The Betterment portfolio historical performance numbers are based on a backtest of the ETFs or indices tracked by each asset class in Betterment’s portfolio as of January 2021. Though we have made an effort to closely match performance results shown to that of the Betterment Portfolio over time, these results are entirely the product of a model. Actual client experience could have varied materially. Performance figures assume dividends are reinvested and daily portfolio rebalancing at market closing prices. The returns are net of a 0.25% annual management fee and fund level expenses. Backtested performance does not represent actual performance and should not be interpreted as an indication of such performance. Actual performance for client accounts may be materially lower. Backtested performance results have certain inherent limitations. Such results do not represent the impact that material economic and market factors might have on an investment adviser’s decision-making process if the adviser were actually managing client money. Backtested performance also differs from actual performance because it is achieved through the retroactive application of model portfolios designed with the benefit of hindsight. As a result, the models theoretically may be changed from time to time and the effect on performance results could be either favorable or unfavorable. See additional disclosure https://www.betterment.com/returns-calculation/.
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What You Should Know About Financial Markets
What You Should Know About Financial Markets Let time work in your favor. Let the market worry about itself. Financial markets are unpredictable. No matter how much research you do and how closely you follow the news, trying to “time the market” usually means withdrawing too early and investing too late. Most investors see better performance by focusing on the long game. With a diversified portfolio and a patient and disciplined approach, the more time you give your investments in the market, the better your portfolio performs. When you try to time the market, you also risk short-term capital gains taxes. Even if you make a profit with constant buying and selling, these taxes quickly eat into your gains. Hold your assets for over a year, and you’ll avoid these short-term taxes. If you do need to make adjustments, try to keep them to a minimum. The best way to adjust your asset allocation is to look at how much time you have to reach your goal. The closer it gets, the less risk you’ll want to take. Got more time? There’s more to unpack about financial markets. In 5 minutes In this guide, we’ll explain: Why a long-term strategy is often the best approach The problems with trying to time the market How to accurately evaluate portfolio performance How to make adjustments when you need to Why a long-term strategy is often the best approach Watch the market closely, and you’ll see it constantly fluctuate. The markets can be sky high one day, then come crashing down the next. Zoom in close enough on any ten-year period, and you’ll see countless short-term gains and losses that can be large in magnitude. Zoom out far enough, and you’ll see a gradual upward trend. It’s easy to get sucked into market speculation. Those short-term wins feel good, and look highly appealing. But you’re not trying to win the lottery here—you’re investing. You’re trying to reach financial goals. At Betterment, we believe the smartest way to do that is by diversifying your portfolio, making regular deposits, and holding your assets for longer. Accurately predicting where the market is going in the short-term is extremely difficult, but investing regularly over the long-term is an activity you can control that can lead to far more reliable performance over time. The power of compounding is real. By regularly investing in a well-diversified portfolio, you’re probably not going to suddenly win big. But you’re unlikely to lose it all, either. And by the time you’re ready to start withdrawing funds, you’ll have a lot more to work with. The basics of diversification Diversification is all about reducing risk. Every financial asset, industry, and market is influenced by different factors that change its performance. Invest too heavily in one area, and your portfolio becomes more vulnerable to its specific risks. Put all your money in an oil company, and a single oil spill, regulation, lawsuit, or change in demand could devastate your portfolio. There’s no failsafe. The less you lean on any one asset, economic sector, or geographical region, the more stable your portfolio will likely be. Diversification sets your portfolio up for long-term success with steadier, more stable performance. The problems with trying to time the market There are two big reasons not to try and time the market: It’s extremely difficult to consistently beat a well-diversified portfolio Taxes Many investors miss more in gains than they avoid in losses by trying to time a dip. Even the best active investors frequently make “the wrong call.” They withdraw too early or go all-in too late. There are too many factors outside of your control. Too much information you don’t have. To beat a well-diversified portfolio, you have to buy and sell at the perfect time. Again. And again. And again. No matter how much market research you do, you’re simply very unlikely to win that battle in the long run. Especially when you consider short-term capital gains taxes. Any time you sell an asset you’ve held for less than a year and make a profit, you have to pay short-term capital gains taxes. Just like that, you might have to shave up to 37% off of your profits. With a passive approach that focuses on the long game, you hold onto assets for much longer, so you’re far less likely to have short-term capital gains (and the taxes that come with them). You don’t just have to consistently beat a well-diversified, buy and hold portfolio. In order to outperform it, you have to blow it out of the water. And that’s why you may want to rethink the way you evaluate portfolio performance. How to evaluate portfolio performance Want to know how well your portfolio is doing? You need to use the right benchmarks and consider after-tax adjustments. US investors often compare their portfolio performance to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But that’s helpful if you’re only invested in the US stock market. If you’re holding a well-diversified portfolio holding stocks and bonds across geographical regions, the Vanguard LifeStrategy Funds or iShares Core Allocation ETFs may be a better comparison. Just make sure you compare apples to apples. If you have a portfolio that’s 80% stocks, don’t compare it to a portfolio with 100% stocks. The other key to evaluating your performance is tax adjustments. How much actually goes in your pocket? If you’re going to lose 30% or more of your profits to short-term capital gains taxes, that’s a large drain on your overall return that may impact how soon you can achieve your financial goals. How to adjust your investments during highs and lows At Betterment, we believe investors get better results when they don’t react to market changes. On a long enough timeline, market highs and lows won’t matter as much. But sometimes, you really do need to make adjustments. The best way to change your portfolio? Start small. Huge, sweeping changes are much more likely to hurt your performance. If stock investments feel too risky, you can even start putting your deposits into US Short-Term Treasuries instead, which are extremely low risk, highly liquid, and mature in about six months. This is called a “dry powder” fund. Make sure your adjustments fit your goal. If your goal is still years or decades away, your investments should probably be weighted more heavily toward diversified stocks. As you get closer to the end date, you can shift to bonds and other low-risk assets. Since it’s extremely hard to time the market, we believe it’s best to ride out the market highs and lows. We also make it easy to adjust your portfolio to fit your level of risk tolerance. It’s like turning a dial up or down, shifting your investments more toward stocks or bonds. You’re in control. And if “don’t worry” doesn’t put you at ease, you can make sure your risk reflects your comfort level. -
4 Betterment Investing Options If You Have Low Risk Tolerance
4 Betterment Investing Options If You Have Low Risk Tolerance If you’re an investor with low risk tolerance, Betterment has options that can help move forward your investing and savings goals, mediating between potential returns and your desired risk level. One of the more hazy concepts to quantify in behavioral investing is the concept of risk tolerance. Though it’s clear that people in general like to win more than they like to lose, there is also a well-known phenomenon that some people are more risk averse than others. Some investors are content to endure losses of more than half of their investment portfolio if they believe that the potential reward is high enough. Others may feel uneasy with even a loss of one percent. In general, we expect that investors who take more risk can often gain higher returns, but that doesn’t mean seeking a low-risk portfolio is the wrong move. On the contrary, steadily investing in a low-risk portfolio can be an appropriate strategy if it’s an approach you can stick with for the long-term. Betterment’s tools can help you determine the amount of risk that’s right for your financial goals and how much you should save to help reach them. If recent market volatility has made you rethink your risk tolerance, here are four options at Betterment that can offer lower risk. Cash Reserve If you’re looking to earn interest on your short-term cash or general savings, consider using Cash Reserve. It’s a cash account that helps you earn a competitive rate—0.75%*. You’ll have the ability to easily transfer your cash to any of your investment goals when you’re ready to take on more risk, but keep in mind that the transfer can take up to two business days to complete. And, not only does Cash Reserve earn a competitive rate, but it also has FDIC insurance up to $1,000,000† once deposited at our program banks. Cash Reserve is only available to clients of Betterment LLC, which is not a bank, and cash transfers to program banks are conducted through the clients’ brokerage accounts at Betterment Securities. Safety Net Betterment’s Safety Net goal is designed with the specific purpose of building you a financial emergency fund. We recommend that you think of this as a pot of money you save for an emergency, such as a temporary loss of employment or a large unexpected expense. After you decide how much money to put into your Safety Net goal, we invest the money into a 30% stock/70% bond ETF portfolio. While this portfolio is riskier than a 0% stock portfolio, it’s likely a more appropriate allocation for your emergency fund as it can be better at combating a hidden risk to your savings goal: inflation. As Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance & Investing wrote recently, “At least a market crash has the decency of showing up in your balance. Inflation doesn’t tell you that it’s cost you”. While Cash Reserve is built to help keep up with inflation in the short-term, the Safety Net goal can offer the opportunity to potentially exceed inflation while seeking to give you a buffer for rainy days. General Investing Using Betterment’s Portfolio At Low Stock Allocation If you’re now thinking that Cash Reserve is too conservative for your needs but the 30% stock allocation of the Safety Net goal is too aggressive, another option is to set your own stock allocation with Betterment’s allocation slider. For every financial goal you set, Betterment recommends a target stock allocation but lets you adjust it from 0% to 100% stocks. Whatever allocation you choose, Betterment will help you along the way. As you move the slider, we will inform you whether your choice is “Very Conservative”, “Appropriately Conservative”, “Moderate”, “Appropriately Aggressive” or “Too Aggressive”. While we don’t recommend that you change your allocation too drastically one way or the other, feel free to try out different allocations in our preview mode to find the portfolio that’s right for you. Using Flexible Portfolios to Choose Assets We build portfolios that balance a number of different asset classes—like U.S. bonds and international stocks—to achieve a high level of diversification. However, if you want to change exposures to specific asset classes, Flexible Portfolios allows you to make changes to your allocation, and you can choose to only hold what are typically low volatility assets. Another valid use of a Flexible Portfolio is to adjust to high concentrations in your holdings outside of Betterment. For example, if you have a large investment in U.S. bonds in an outside account, you could use a Flexible Portfolio to shift your allocation at Betterment towards more international bonds and away from U.S. bonds. A Flexible Portfolio starts with the Betterment Portfolio Strategy as a baseline, and then we allow you to tune the specific allocation to your preferences. While we don’t recommend you make asset class changes, if you have specific views, you could choose only assets that generally have less volatility. However, you should note that we have specific guidelines for appropriate uses of Flexible Portfolios, and generally, our recommendation is to only decrease risk by adjusting your allocation using your goal slider. As you change the allocation, we will analyze the holdings and inform you whether the risk of the portfolio is suited for your goal, as well as whether the portfolio is adequately diversified. Conclusion Deciding where to place your hard earned cash can be an emotional experience for even the most seasoned financial planner. Choosing a portfolio or cash account that you can stick with can be particularly important to reaching your financial goals. No matter which of the options above you choose, Betterment will give you advice and support to help you reach your financial goals. -
How Portfolio Rebalancing Works to Manage Risk
How Portfolio Rebalancing Works to Manage Risk Portfolio rebalancing, when done effectively, can help manage risk and keep you on track to pursue the expected returns you want to reach your goals. What is rebalancing? Over time, the value of individual ETFs in a diversified portfolio move up and down, drifting away from the target weights that help achieve proper diversification. Over the long term, stocks generally rise faster than bonds, so the stock portion of your portfolio will likely go up relative to the bond portion—except when you rebalance the portfolio to target the original allocation. The difference between the target allocation for your portfolio and the actual weights in your current portfolio (e.g. your actual allocation) is called portfolio drift. Measuring Portfolio Drift At Betterment, we define portfolio drift as the total deviation of each asset class (put in positive terms) from its target allocation weight, divided by two. Here’s a simplified example, with only four assets: Target Current Deviation (±) U.S. Bonds 25% 30% 5% International Bonds 25% 20% 5% U.S. Stocks 25% 30% 5% International Stocks 25% 20% 5% Total 20% Total ÷ 2 10% A high drift may expose you to more (or less) risk than you intended when you set the target allocation, and much of that risk may be uncompensated—meaning that the portfolio isn’t targeted higher expected returns by taking on the additional risk. Taking actions to reduce this drift is called rebalancing, which Betterment automatically does for you in several ways, depending on the circumstances, and always with an eye on tax efficiency. Cash Flow Rebalancing This method involves either buying or selling, but not both, and generally occurs when cash flows into or out of the portfolio are happening anyway. Cash flows (deposit, dividend reinvestment or withdrawal) can be used to rebalance your portfolio. Fractional shares allow us to allocate these cash flows with precision to the penny. Inflows: You may be rebalanced if you make a deposit, including when you auto-deposit or receive dividends in your account. We use the inflow to buy the asset classes you are currently under-weight, reducing your drift. The result is that the need to sell in order to rebalance is reduced (and with sufficient inflows, eliminated completely). No sales means no capital gains, which means no taxes will be owed. This method is so desirable that we’ve built it directly into our application. Whenever your drift is higher than normal (approximately 2% or higher), we calculate the deposit required to reduce your drift to zero, and make it easy for you to make the deposit. Although we show the deposit amount needed to bring drift back to 0%, smaller deposits also help reduce drift. In fact, the first dollars deposited have the largest impact on reducing drift. This means, for example, that depositing half the amount recommended to reduce drift to 0% will generally reduce drift by more than half. Portfolio Drift vs. Deposit Size The chart above is a hypothetical, illustrative example of the relationship between portfolio drift and deposits needed to rebalance without selling any assets. The blue line in the chart demonstrates the general relationship between deposit size and drift. As you can see, the first dollars of a deposit reduce drift by more than the last dollars. The dotted grey line shows what a linear relationship between drift and deposits would look like. Withdrawals (and other outflows) are likewise used to rebalance, by first selling asset classes that are overweight. (Once that is achieved, we sell all asset classes equally to keep you in balance.) We employ a sophisticated ‘lot selection’ algorithm called TaxMin within asset classes to minimize the tax impact as much as possible in taxable accounts. Sell/Buy Rebalancing In the absence of cash flows, we rebalance by selling and buying, reshuffling assets that are already in the portfolio. When cash flows are not sufficient to keep your portfolio’s drift within a certain tolerance, we sell just enough of the overweight asset classes, and use the proceeds to buy into the underweight asset classes to reduce the drift to zero. Sell/Buy rebalancing is triggered whenever the portfolio drift reaches or exceeds 3%. Our algorithms check your drift approximately once per day, and rebalance if necessary. Note: In addition to the higher threshold, we built in another restriction into the rebalancing algorithm for taxable accounts. As with any sell trade, our tax minimization algorithm seeks to select the lowest tax impact lots, and stops before selling any lots that would realize short-term capital gains when possible. Since short-term capital gains are taxed at a higher rate than long-term capital gains, we can achieve higher after-tax outcomes by simply waiting for those lots to become long-term before rebalancing, if it's still necessary at that point. As a result, it’s possible for your portfolio to stay above the 3% drift if we have no long-term lots to sell. Almost always, it’s because the account is less than a year old. In this case, we recommend rebalancing via a deposit to avoid taxes. The Portfolio Tab will let you know how much to deposit, as described above. Please note that for advised clients on our Betterment For Advisors platform, the drift threshold is 5% for portfolios that contain mutual funds. Allocation Change Rebalancing Changing your target allocation by moving the allocation slider and confirming the change will also cause a rebalance. Because you have chosen a new target allocation, Betterment will rebalance to the new target with 0% drift. This sells securities and could possibly realize capital gains. Moreover, if you change your allocation even by 1%, you will be rebalanced entirely to match your new desired target allocation, regardless of tax consequences. As with all sell trades, we will utilize our tax minimization algorithm to help reduce the tax impact. Additionally, before you confirm your allocation change we will let you know the potential tax impact of the change with Tax Impact Preview. Transaction Timelines If you’d like to turn off automated rebalancing so that Betterment only rebalances your portfolio in response to cash flows (i.e., deposits, withdrawals, or dividend reinvestments) and not by reshuffling assets already in the portfolio, please contact Customer Support. Our team will be happy to help you do this. -
Managing Your Allocation As Your Goal Approaches
Managing Your Allocation As Your Goal Approaches Automatically adjusting your allocation is one area of advice where automation can play a particularly important role for investors. “Am I holding the right kind of investments in my portfolio?” “Am I taking on too much risk by staying invested in stocks?” “Am I being too conservative by holding bonds?” These are questions that are often on the top of an investor’s mind. And rightly so, especially when a major life goal, like retirement, starts to feel closer than it used to. Taking on too much market risk could lead to losses for investors who plan to use their money soon. But taking on too little risk may mean leaving possible returns on the table. It’s during the countdown of an investment’s time horizon when many investors begin to feel less certain of what their allocation should be. This is when professionally managed allocation advice can help you reach your desired outcome. In this article, we will: Describe how portfolio allocation advice works Demonstrate how automation enables advisors—like Betterment—to implement more precise allocation advice Illustrate how Betterment customers can stay on track by enabling us to auto-adjust their allocation as their investment approaches the date they wish to use the money. The Essentials of Understanding Allocation Advice Every account you hold has a portfolio, and that portfolio is defined by its asset allocation. That’s your specific weighting of stocks and bonds in your portfolio strategy, usually calibrated to control risk. One of the most important roles an investment advisor can play is helping you tailor your allocation based on your investment goals. In a conventional advisory setting, changes to your allocation might occur periodically—perhaps once per year—leading to a stairstep-like fall of your allocation’s risk (i.e., more bonds and less stock over time). At Betterment, adjusting an allocation is one area of advice where automation can play a particularly important role for investors. As long as you choose to follow Betterment’s advice, we will automatically adjust your allocation through time to control risk as you near the end of your goal’s investing timeline. Rather than downshifting risk every so often, leading to a series of stairsteps, Betterment’s automation makes incremental changes to your risk level, rendering a smoother path from a higher risk level to a lower one. The smoother the path, the closer you stay to your optimal allocation. The below chart is an example that shows the target allocation for a Major Purchase goal that an investor would have if she updated her target allocation annually compared to more frequent monthly updates. As you can see, the size of any individual portfolio change is smaller when allocation is updated monthly. Major Purchase Target Allocation through Time The quality of the allocation advice an advisor offers depends heavily on how effectively they enable you to execute on that advice. Betterment provides full transparency on how we’ve designed our allocation advice to work here, but more importantly, we help you execute the advice through automation. Automation enables more precise allocations. For most accounts, the ideal allocation is one that changes to reduce risk as you near your goal. While some investors prefer to make every allocation change themselves, automation can help adjust an allocation with as much efficiency as possible. Think of it like a plane’s automatic landing system; in weather conditions that can be hard for a pilot to navigate, the automatic landing system helps put a plane in position to land safely. Similarly, automatic adjustment of your allocation helps keep you on track to meet your goal. Allocation advice should be personal. The key with allocation advice is to base the advice on well-researched evidence for appropriate risk levels. At Betterment, for every account you open, we automatically provide allocation advice based on the type of goal assigned to an account and your investment horizon. Different investment goals are used in very different ways. For example, a retirement goal generally has a long time horizon, and, once you reach retirement, you will potentially spend that money for the next 30 years or more. This requires a very different portfolio allocation than if you are saving for a major purchase, like a house, where the investment horizon is generally shorter and you will spend the full amount at once on your down payment. Appropriate allocation advice will consider these factors for each goal and frequently reassess them to ensure risk remains in control. Allocation advice should be executed tax-efficiently. The problem with some forms of allocation advice is that they are not executed tax-efficiently. Any change to an allocation can involve selling investments, which may cause taxes. The ideal allocation advice adjusts the allocation in a manner that causes an investor to realize the fewest possible capital gains taxes. For Betterment customers, we use the cash coming in and out of your account, as well as market changes, to help avoid sales that might cause taxes. Deposits, withdrawals, and dividends help us guide your portfolio toward the target allocation while minimizing the need to sell assets—which may result in taxes—to reach the right balance. Similarly, because our allocation advice allows a degree of drift from your target allocation, we can use changes in the market to help you balance your portfolio tax-efficiently and without unnecessary trading. If selling some investments is necessary to adjust your allocation, we use our TaxMin algorithm to minimize any potential tax impact. When we sell an investment that is overweight, we first look for shares that have losses, which may be used to offset other taxes, then we sell shares with long-term capital gains, and lastly short-term capital gains. To learn more about how Betterment approaches tax-efficient investing, please visit this resource. By auto-adjusting allocations, Betterment helps save you time—and much more. As explained before, your allocation advice is only as good as its capacity for implementation. If you plan to follow our allocation advice but adjust your allocation yourself, it can be time-consuming and a challenge to make the necessary changes as tax-efficiently as you might want to. By allowing Betterment to auto-adjust your allocation based on our advice, you not only save time but also gain the tax-efficiency of a smoother path from higher risk to lower risk. Near the end of an investment’s term, when account balances are often at their highest, most investors want to feel certain about what their final balance will be. A market downturn at the end of your investment period will usually cause a worse dollar loss than a similar-sized downturn earlier on, when your balance was likely smaller. Auto-adjusting an allocation helps you gain greater certainty without having to worry about making major changes. It saves time and adds efficiency, but more importantly helps you gain peace of mind. And even as you automate your allocation, you can always know exactly how your allocation will change because Betterment provides full transparency on how our allocation advice varies by goal, and your account will always detail what your current allocation is. At Betterment, our goal is to help you feel confident that you are taking an appropriate amount of risk through the life of your investment and that, as allocations change in your account to control risk, they are being managed efficiently. -
Currency Risk Does Not Belong in Your Bond Portfolio
Currency Risk Does Not Belong in Your Bond Portfolio International bonds can help improve your portfolio’s performance, but leave currency bets to gamblers. When you buy things in a foreign currency—whether that’s goods and services as a traveler, or stocks and bonds as an investor—you are faced with a central issue: How far will your dollar go? Exchange rates ebb and flow on a daily basis, which creates currency risk. For the infrequent traveler, that may be an acceptable risk, but for the investor, the currency risk could wipe out his portfolio gains. Today, this is an increasingly visible issue for investors as the integration of global financial markets is making it easier for investors to access far-flung markets and asset classes. When foreign investments are denominated in a currency other than U.S. dollars, the returns you make on them must be translated back to American currency. That means an international fund’s performance, when reported in U.S. dollars, also includes the effect of exchange-rate movements. Individual investors are not immune to currency movements, either. If his or her own investments are issued in a foreign currency, he or she may lose if the exchange rate moves against them, even if the investment itself has a positive return. For example, if John is invested in Apple Inc. bonds that are denominated in the yen, and the yen depreciates against the dollar, when John converts from the depreciated yen back to the dollar, his investments may be worth less even if Apple sees great returns. Yet a well-diversified portfolio can help avoid that risk, allowing investors to tap the upside of diversification while managing risk associated with currency fluctuations. The Origin of Currency Risk Governing bodies around the world set economic agendas independently. Monetary policies, as a result, range from economic region to economic region, resulting in varying interest rates. Interest rates, in short, are the rate at which borrowers pay lenders. Countries use interest rate targets as tools to manage their own economies. For example, central banks can reduce interest rates to encourage investment and consumption in that country—or raise rates to deter borrowing. Interest rates directly affect currency exchange rates and thus create currency risk. While rates are being re-evaluated by countries, the good news is that rate changes do not work in lock step. For an investor who’s invested in bonds of different countries, the internationally diversified bond portfolio may allow investors to lessen their overall interest rate risk. Importantly, however, this exposure to currency risk is an uncompensated risk. Changes in exchange rates create return volatility without introducing additional expected returns. While rate changes may randomly add returns in your favor in the short term, the expectation should always be of zero return over the long term. It is true that currency moves can be profitable if you are on the right side of them. The “carry trade” involves borrowing from low-interest rate currencies to invest in high-interest rate currencies. This strategy has demonstrated it can be profitable over some periods of time.1 However, the same carry strategies exhibited large losses during the 2008 financial crisis, making the point that such strategies’ “tail risk” (risk of unpredictable losses) potentially cancels out their profitability during more normal times.2 How to Mitigate Currency Risk in Bonds There are two ways to mitigate currency risk: 1. Buy foreign securities issued in U.S. dollars. A U.S. investor who wants to invest in the bonds of the Mexican government, for example, can invest in bonds that are purchased, have income issued, and have principal returned in U.S. dollars. By doing so, he or she she is never exposed to USD/MEX currency risk. In contrast, a U.S. investor who purchases a U.S. bond issued by Apple Inc. but denominated in Japanese Yen (JPY) is exposed to currency volatility. So a U.S. investor investing in a U.S. company can still be exposed to currency fluctuations if the bond is denominated in another currency. 2. Hedge currency risk. Another way to mitigate currency risk is to put on a hedge. In the simplest terms, a currency hedge is insurance against a currency move in either direction, for or against you. A currency hedge technically involves two parties exchanging a set amount of one currency for another at a predetermined exchange rate and amount at a future date. When you hedge currency risk, you can remove currency risk from your investment… at a cost. The hedge itself costs something to manage and maintain. The cost depends on the currency being hedged—liquid developed currencies are generally easier and cheaper to hedge than emerging ones. In exchange for this cost, your investment will likely have lower volatility, as the currency fluctuations are removed. There are many ways to hedge currencies. These include forwards, swaps, futures, and options. All of these methods allow investors to lock in a set exchange rate today to eliminate potential exchange rate volatility that may arise in the future. To permanently hedge an investment, an investor must continually close contracts that have come due, and invest in new ones further into the future. This process is called “rolling” the contracts, and can have a small ongoing transaction cost. Hedge International Bonds, Not International Stocks Currency hedging, like most insurance, is not free, and so the benefits need to be balanced against the cost. If hedging costs you more than it benefits you, you shouldn’t do it. To find out, weigh the reduction in volatility against the incremental cost of buying the hedged (rather than unhedged) version of the ETF. A Vanguard study analyzed the impact of currency hedging on foreign bonds and stocks and found that hedging is beneficial for bonds but not for stocks.3 This is because of the different volatility characteristics of stocks and bonds, and their correlations with currency moves. Bonds, as an asset class, are typically less volatile than both stocks and currencies: Equity Volatility > Currency Volatility > Bond Volatility When you take a position in unhedged foreign currency bonds, the volatility of the investment will come predominantly from the currency fluctuations, not the bonds themselves. Research has shown that the volatility of unhedged currency fluctuations often overwhelm the diversification benefits that international bonds bring to a portfolio. In contrast, because currency risk is usually a very small proportion of volatility in foreign stocks, there is far less benefit from hedging the stock exposure. Compare the relative contribution of the currency component to the overall return and volatility in bonds and stocks: Impact of Currency Risk on Bonds vs. Stocks Whether it’s stocks or bonds, currency does not contribute substantial returns. However, it has a substantial risk in terms of volatility, and all the more so when it comes to bonds. The increase in risk of not hedging bonds is significant and cannot be overlooked. Currency Hedging Reduces Volatility The graph above illustrates the volatility difference between international bond ETFs with currency risk versus their currency risk-free counterpart. Vanguard’s Total International Bond ETF (BNDX) hedges out the currency risk through currency forwards. In contrast, the iShares International Treasury Bond ETF, IGOV, keeps the currency volatility intact. The daily volatility inherent to IGOV is more than twice that of BNDX. The sharp increase in volatility because of currency fluctuations applies to emerging market ETFs, as well. The Vanguard emerging market government bond ETF, VWOB, eliminates currency risk by investing in dollar denominated government bonds issued by emerging markets. The iShares emerging markets bond ETF, LEMB, likewise tracks emerging market sovereign bonds but includes currency risk by investing in bonds denominated in the local currency. The local-currency version has nearly twice the volatility of the dollar denominated version. Balancing Cost and Volatility Reduction Volatility is only part of the equation. The other aspect of making the decision about hedging is the cost of hedging. The below chart illustrates the additional cost of the hedged ETF and the volatility reduction associated with using a hedged ETF. As is seen with the Vanguard Total International Bond ETF, BNDX, the ETF without the currency risk is not always the most expensive. Although BNDX eliminates the currency risk, it also charges 15bps less in terms of expense ratio cost. The reduction in currency volatility associated with stocks, on the other hand, is less drastic despite the higher cost of hedging. If you are not as familiar with the funds, see the bulleted list below. Volatility Reduction and the Additional Cost of the Hedged ETF Asset Class Hedged Fund Expense Ratio Unhedged Fund Expense Ratio Additional Cost of Hedged ETF Volatility Reduction Developed International Stocks 0.70% HEFA 0.09% VEA 0.61% -3.40% Emerging Market Stocks 1.46% HEEM 0.15% VWO 1.31% -5.60% Developed International Bonds 0.20% BNDX 0.35% IGOV - 0.15% -7.90% Note: HEFA, HEEM have fee waivers until 2020. We are using the expected long-term expense ratios. HEFA: iShares Currency Hedged MSCI EAFE ETF tracks the performance of large and mid-cap equities in Europe, Australasia, and the Far East. VEA: Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF tracks the performance of the FTSE Developed ex North America Stock Index. The companies are mostly large and mid-cap companies. Canada and the U.S. are excluded. VEA is in the Betterment portfolio. HEEM: iShares Currency Hedged MSCI Emerging Markets ETF tracks the performance of large and mid-cap emerging market equities. The currency exposure is offset through currency forwards. VWO: Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF invests in large-, mid-, and small-cap equities in emerging markets. VWO is in the Betterment portfolio. BNDX: Vanguard Total International Bond ETF tracks the performance of the Barclays Global Aggregate ex-USD Float Adjusted RIC Capped Index (USD Hedged). BNDX is in the Betterment portfolio. IGOV: iShares International Treasury Bond ETF tracks the performance of an index of non-U.S. developed market government bonds. Currency Risk at Betterment If you invest with Betterment, we have designed your bond portfolio to mitigate currency risk. We believe that the volatility attributed to currencies is not a compensated risk, and so, when affordable, it should be avoided. Whether we eliminate the risk through hedging or through a direct purchase of U.S. denominated bonds largely depends on the geography of the bond ETF. (See our interactive graphic to determine the exact geographical allocation of your portfolio.) Geography is an important factor to take into account when determining the best way to mitigate currency risk. While it’s prohibitively expensive to hedge emerging investments due to the larger number of currencies and the inefficiency of those markets, a basket of developed market currencies can be hedged efficiently. Because of these considerations, your international developed-country bond ETFs at Betterment are hedged at the ETF level (BNDX). BNDX hedges currency fluctuations inside of the fund. In this case, the fund purchases one-month forward contracts to exchange currencies in the future at today’s rates. If rates move between now and then, the investor is not exposed to those moves, because the value of the forward contract will offset the moves in currency. In contrast, your emerging market bonds are denominated in USD (VWOB, EMB, PCY) because of the cost considerations when it comes to hedging multiple emerging market countries. While the bonds are issued from developing countries, both their value and interest is defined in USD, removing concerns about currency risk. 1Burnside, Craig, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo. "Carry Trade and Momentum in Currency Markets." Annu. Rev. Fin. Econ. Annual Review of Financial Economics 3.1 (2011): 511-35. Web. 2 Lustig, Hanno, and Adrien Verdelhan. "The Cross Section of Foreign Currency Risk Premia and Consumption Growth Risk." American Economic Review 97.1 (2007): 89-117. UCLA Publications. UCLA, 2007. Web. 16 June 2015. https://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/lustig/lustig303.pdf. 3 Thomas, Charles, and Paul Bosse. "Understanding the ‘Hedge Return’: The Impact of Currency Hedging in Foreign Bonds." Understanding the 'Hedge Return': The Impact of Currency Hedging in Foreign Bonds(2014): n. pag. Vanguard Research, 1 July 2014. Web. 1 June 2015. https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGHC.pdf. * Volatility based on MSCI EAFE (hedged and unhedged) indices from Figure 4: Average rolling 12-month standard deviation over 10 years (7/1/04–6/30/14). Kittsley, Dodd, and Abby Woodham. Purer Return and Reduced Volatility: Hedging Currency Risk in International-equity Portfolios. N.p.: Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management, Sept. 2014. PDF. Deutsche Asset calculations ** Volatility based on MSCI Emerging Market (hedged and unhedged) indices from Figure 4: Average rolling 12-month standard deviation over 10 years (7/1/04–6/30/14). Kittsley, Dodd, and Abby Woodham. Purer Return and Reduced Volatility: Hedging Currency Risk in International-equity Portfolios. N.p.: Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management, Sept. 2014. PDF. Deutsche Asset calculations * Volatility based on MSCI Barclays Agg (hedged and unhedged) indices from Figure 4: Average rolling 12-month standard deviation over 10 years (7/1/04–6/30/14). Kittsley, Dodd, and Abby Woodham. Purer Return and Reduced Volatility: Hedging Currency Risk in International-equity Portfolios. N.p.: Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management, Sept. 2014. PDF. Deutsche Asset calculations This article originally appeared on ETF.com.
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