Offshore assets present investors with an increased investment universe and additional opportunities for reward, but embedded exposure to exchange rates can result in additional risk. In this work, we consider a global equity portfolio of five equity indices (US, Japan, Europe, UK and Canada),...

We describe how forward-looking information on the statistical properties of an asset can be extracted directly from options market data and how this can be used practically in portfolio management. Although the extraction of a forward-looking risk-neutral distribution is well-established in the...

One of the most important aspects in portfolio management is having an accurate understanding of the future possible returns of the underlying assets. Unfortunately, estimating such return distributions is anything but trivial. In this research, we consider the information embedded in the...

In previous Peregrine Securities work, it was shown that currency hedge selection can be approached in an optimization framework and that the particular choice of hedge is strongly dependent on the correlation between the exchange rate and the foreign asset. Unfortunately, correlations between...

It's often said that diversification is the only ‘free lunch' available to investors; meaning that a properly diversified portfolio reduces total risk without necessarily sacrificing expected return. However, achieving true diversification is easier said than done, especially when we don't...

We focus on the issue of currency management in the context of offshore investing with an emphasis on the selection of an appropriate currency hedge. It is shown that when seeking to minimize the risk associated with the Rand value of a foreign asset, the optimal currency hedge is strongly...

In this report we study South African implied volatility from three different perspectives. Firstly, we conduct an analysis of the historical Top40 Index implied volatility surface dynamics. In particular, we consider the regime-dependence of atm volatility and skew levels and how this...

We address a very topical – and to some extent, intractable – question: When should I hedge? By analysing South African historical market returns, we show that only a handful of extreme returns – which are well characterised by two simple quantitative indicators – can have a significant...

This report provides an overview of the utility of single stock and custom basket options in fund management. It is shown that managers of active equity funds can limit possible negative return contributions of their over - and underweight positions via single stock options and thus help to...

This report focusses on three particular areas of risk, effectively covering high-level risk drivers, low-level risk interactions and finally cross-sectional risk opportunities.1) In prior work, we showed that a simple 3-factor global model explained a high percentage of local equity index...