A New Way to Tackle This Market Moment
U.S. stocks aren’t far from their all-time highs, while the income investors can earn from bonds is a pittance. So investing in stocks feels risky, and bond yields are too thin to do you much good.
The obvious solution is to diversify: outside the U.S., outside of stocks and bonds, and into assets that can protect you from bear markets or an inflationary shock. To do that, you’d normally have to sell some stocks or bonds to free up cash.
That isn’t the only way to diversify, though. Some investors engage in a tactic they like to call “return stacking.”
An illustration of this odd-sounding approach is an exchange-traded fund, WisdomTree U.S. Efficient Core, with $676 million in assets and 0.2% in annual expenses. Since its launch just over three years ago, it has slightly outperformed the S&P 500, after fees, with a smoother ride.
The fund takes a novel approach to diversification. It keeps 90% of its assets in a portfolio of stocks highly similar to the S&P 500 index. It keeps 10% in cash and cash equivalents. It then uses that cash as collateral to buy futures contracts on U.S. Treasurys.
Those futures are a low-cost form of leverage, or borrowing. This gives investors more bang for their buck. For every dollar you invest, the fund provides $1.50 in exposure to stocks and bonds.
And here’s the crucial point: Of that $1.50, 90 cents (or 60%) goes into stocks and 60 cents (40%) into bonds.
That creates the functional equivalent of owning a so-called balanced fund, with about 60% in U.S. stocks and 40% in U.S. bonds, one-and-a-half times over.
It also creates flexibility for an investor.
Imagine you have $3,000. You could stash it all in a balanced fund. Or you could achieve the same result by putting just two-thirds of it in a fund like this. That’s because the fund leverages your money 1.5 to 1. So you can invest less and use the rest of it to buy other assets.
“You get the same exposure for less capital,” says
Jeremy Schwartz,
global head of research at
in New York, the Efficient Core fund’s sponsor. This way, you still have $1,000 left over, and “that cash option is valuable,” Mr. Schwartz says.
Corey Hoffstein, chief investment officer at Newfound Research LLC, an asset-management firm in Wellesley Hills, Mass., calls this “return stacking.”
On top of your $2,000 stack of stocks and…
Read More: A New Way to Tackle This Market Moment