Liquid Alts, Pt. 2: Long-Short Bond and Macro Strategies

The first post in this blog series provided an overview of liquid alternatives strategies while providing a closer look at long-short equity strategies and event-driven strategies.  In this post we focus on long-short bond strategies and macro strategies, with concluding thoughts about selecting liquid alternative products.

Long-Short Bond Strategies

Long-short bond strategies include convertible arbitrage, relative value and distressed debt, and typically are used as bond substitutes in portfolio construction. Other long-short bond strategies may increase or decrease different risk factors, such as interest rate or credit risk, in order to produce a less correlated return pattern.

Convertible arbitrage strategies are similar to merger arbitrage, with funds typically buying convertible bonds while shorting the stocks of the same issuer. Conceptually, convertible arbitrage investors are seeking to capture the embedded option contained in the convertible structure while also benefiting from an illiquidity premium associated with the convertible.

Relative value strategies exploit price differences between various bonds and can offer steady returns with risk that is less correlated with bond markets. However, relative value strategies are also vulnerable to extreme market environments, and a strategy that is steady in good times can provide unexpected downside during events such as the Russia bond default in 1998 and the financial crisis of 2008. 

Distressed debt strategies invest in companies or government entities that are in default or are in distress and are headed for a likely default.  Investors often use distressedvdebt as an alternative investment, buying the debt at a deep discount while aiming for a high return if the company or country does not go bankrupt or there is a higher than expected recovery rate post-default.

We categorize distressed debt as a more volatile subset of the non-investment grade bond category. Distressed debt is less prominent among liquid alternatives than in the traditional alternatives landscape, as regulatory restrictions limit the ability of liquid alternative products to invest in what are typically concentrated and illiquid opportunities.

Macro Strategies

Currency strategies invest in currency futures, forwards or in short-term government debt.  Most of these strategies are short the U.S. dollar. Many of the strategies invest in higher-yielding currencies while shorting lower-yield currencies. Other strategies are trend following, using momentum to generate returns. The objective of currency funds is to provide bond-like returns and risk in a manner that’s uncorrelated with stock and bond markets.

Managed futures strategies make bets on a wide variety of futures contracts based on price momentum. These strategies are typically quantitative in nature and are designed to provide returns uncorrelated with equity markets. These portfolios are often diversified and include global exposures to currencies, commodities, equities and fixed income markets.  

Global macro strategies invest long and short in a wide variety of investments, including bonds, forwards, swaps and bonds in order to provide absolute returns with risks uncorrelated to stock and bond markets. A global macro strategy’s investment philosophy is often more nuanced and its process more qualitative when compared to a typical managed futures strategy that may follow a strictly mechanical trend-following process.

Macro strategies are typically used as bond substitutes due to their low volatility and low correlation to equities.