Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

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> "If you have a few extra billion you might not want to tie it all to the performance of the US equity market."

Yes, but... Vanguard's S&P 500 fund isn't the only index fund on the planet, either. You can include a broad international fund, a region or country-specific fund, or any other number of factors. Diversification and passivity are orthogonal.

> "if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees"

Yes, but:

1. You're taking on a higher degree of risk, because the information available to you is much more opaque and unregulated (e.g. EBITA as a valuation metric, when it's so easy manipulated). Bubbles are hard to time, even when you do have decent data available. But investors in that world are just completely flying blind. And historically received only a small net premium for that additional risk.

2. Even that historical premium seems to be gone now. As I pointed out from the article, that "1-2%" is looking back over a quarter-century timeframe. Over the past 10 years, half of PE has UNDERPERFORMED the market. The direction of the trend does not look favorable.

Hey Steve, while you are correct I think the confusion is related to what cmdkeen (and the article authors) mean by diversification.

Whilst your comments are valid for public equity - this is simply one of several types of "asset classes" someone with billions of dollars has access too. Different, non-public asset classes can have properties distinct from bubble risks or liquidity.

One of the key benefits of holding a variety of asset classes, particularly the more exotic ones - is that their performance can be uncorrelated with the performance of the stock and debt markets.

Some examples of PE asset classes:

- Venture Capital (very high risk, but over a long period of time is supposed to generate 20-30% rates of return)

- Angel Investing (higher risk still, and you need many companies but also generating 20-30% returns with a big enough portfolio)

- Commercial real estate (uncorrelated to global equity market performance - rather its connected to local market performance, pretty sure around 10% can be typical for offices)

- Infrastructure projects (uncorrelated again, lower rates of return but you are locking in those returns for decades)

There are tonnes of course, but when you start talking about personally investing such large sums of money - diversification means a lot more than just buying investments in the public markets (either bonds or stocks).

Any source for the 20-30% claim? I find that very hard to believe.

Seen it referenced a few times, some digging around will get you there. Also an angel investor spoke at my university about how they invest, and mentioned returns of 23%/24% annualized if I recall - but this was asterisked with "your portfolio of companies must be greater then 20 - any less and you risk losing everything". And, your money is essentially "locked" for 5-10 years (can only get your cash when there is a liquidity event - if one happens at all)

Found this: http://www.industryventures.com/2017/02/07/the-venture-capit... And: http://www.angelblog.net/Venture_Capital_Funds_How_the_Math_...

But given there are many different flavors, sizes, vectors etc of VCs, and given many keep their numbers hush, hush - I wouldn't even know where to look for any kind of "official" numbers on it.

http://www.industryventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/P...

If you add the averages of each category(75x for the last category) in this source, you'll end up with an annualized return of 9.4% over the 10 years mentioned in the image.

That is not far of the average return of the SP500.

Regarding 1. the risk can also be substantially lower for PE firms, because A. Extensive FVDD (Financial Vendor Due Diligence) and other types of risk assessment are carried out over the negotiation phase, and you are far less susceptible to stock market movements. Also, unlike investing in public companies, the PE fund is almost always the sole investor in the business alongside a small management tie-up, meaning you actually have full control over the business financially and strategically

You can increase your returns by diversifying into uncorrelated assets even if that other asset has returns that underperform the market.

That's why you see the 80/20 stock/bond split recommended so often. Even though bonds underperform stocks, the 80/20 split regularly rebalanced outperforms 100% stocks. Rebalancing is an automatic "buy low / sell high" strategy. After a stock market crash your 80/20 split might be 50/50 so you take that 30% and buy cheap stocks...

Diversification reduces the variance of the portfolio returns but does not necessarily increase returns.

Actually, the 80/20 portfolio will decrease returns vs the market. It will outperform on a risk adjusted basis, ie have a higher sharpe ratio (maybe). But the highest return portfolio will always be the one that allocates 100% to the highest returning asset - in this case all to stocks.

According to Vanguard the 100% equities portfolio has historically outperformed all portfolios with bonds.

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/saving-investing/m...

No matter how much you diversify your long-only strategies, you will still not even be close to market neutral, which is probably what you really want at that scale.

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