Permanent Portfolio Q&A

Last week’s permanent portfolio post generated some great questions and feedback, so I wanted to do a follow-up post addressing some of the most common issues raised.

That’s a big allocation to gold. What about using REITs instead of gold?

Admittedly, gold has a lot of issues as an asset. The biggest issue with gold is that it’s a negative carry asset. Not only is there no yield on gold, but there are also costs associated with storing it (fun fact: your primary residence is also a negative carry asset unless you rent out a room or two).

In theory, it would make a lot of sense to allocate to REITs in place of gold. In an inflationary environment, the real value of the properties would increase while the real value of any debt on them would decrease.

I was able to pull US Equity REIT return data from NAREIT back to 1972 and run a new backtest looking at two different approaches to a REIT allocation. (h/t to @IrvingFisher15 for pointing me to this data on Twitter) The first portfolio swaps half the gold allocation for REITs. The second portfolio swaps half the US equity exposure for a dedicated allocation to REITS. I compared both to a 100% US Equity allocation.

By swapping some gold for REITs you improve the portfolio’s return and volatility profile but at the cost of greater drawdowns and greater correlation with the US equity market.

To me, a decision on this comes down to each investor’s preferred risk exposures.

In a barbell approach to portfolio construction such as the one that I favor, I would opt not to replace gold with REITs, because the whole point is to mitigate drawdowns in the “core” sleeve of the portfolio. The opportunistic sleeve of the portfolio will necessarily contain a significant amount of equity risk. This may include real estate exposure.

Someone who is implementing the permanent portfolio as a standalone portfolio, however, would likely prefer the return profile where REITs replace some of the gold.

In the basic permanent portfolio, there’s not enough equity exposure.

Usually I find when people say “there’s not enough equity exposure” what they’re really saying is “the CAGR is too low relative to my return hurdle.” We’ve been conditioned to believe that when CAGRs are too low the only solution is to take more equity risk. But that’s not necessarily true.

This is where the leveraged permanent portfolio concept comes into play. To illustrate what this might look like for a DIY investor, I backtested a simple implementation of a leveraged permanent portfolio.

Portfolio #1 is a 50/50 allocation to PIMCO StocksPLUS and GLD. The PIMCO fund uses a bond portfolio to collateralize a 100% net long exposure to S&P 500 futures for 200% notional exposure. So, at the portfolio level, this portfolio is 50% bonds, 50% stocks and 50% gold for 150% notional exposure.

Portfolio #2 is a 100% allocation to SPY as an investable proxy for the S&P 500.

Vanguard Balanced Index is included as an investable proxy benchmark for a traditional 60/40 allocation.

Below are the results.

While this is a relatively short time period, I find the results quite compelling. The leverage allows you to increase portfolio returns without adding equity exposure. While the addition of leverage does increase portfolio drawdowns, you’ve gotten a slightly better return than a 100% SPY portfolio with drawdown characteristics similar to a 60/40 portfolio. And again, in the bargain you’re much better protected from an inflationary regime than you would be using either of the alternatives.

One of the most significant shifts in my thinking around asset allocation over time has been to embrace the use of a modest amount of leverage to build more diversified portfolios that are still capable of meeting investors’ return hurdles. I guess I am slowly but surely transforming into a risk parity guy. Of course, the REIT-for-gold switch discussed earlier in this post is also a form of levering a portfolio (REITs are leveraged assets).

Anyway, I’d be remiss to move on without commenting on what I believe is the biggest issue with implementing a permanent portfolio, either levered or unlevered, for an actual client. Particularly a retail advisory client. The issue is that the portfolio massively underperforms equity markets in strong bull markets. So it’s absolutely critical a permanent portfolio investor remain focused on absolute returns in these types of environments. Otherwise, envy will lead to FOMO and FOMO to bailing out of the strategy at EXACTLY the wrong time.

The permanent portfolio truly shines when equity markets are getting hammered, either due to inflation or deflation. It’s not a sexy way to generate returns. The behavioral challenges this presents for investors should not be underestimated.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a “solution” for this. Either people are willing to accept the potential opportunity costs of the strategy and cultivate the discipline necessary to stick with it through thick and thin, or they’re not.

What about replacing the gold allocation with trend following or Bitcoin or other uncorrelated alternatives?

By all means! Knock yourselves out. Gold was merely the easiest uncorrelated alternative for me to backtest, and also (probably) the easiest for the DIY investor or retail financial advisor to actually implement at this time. Furthermore, it doesn’t require the investor to bet on a specific investment manager to implement.

But I think it’s perfectly valid to replace the gold allocation with other uncorrelated alternatives. A word of caution, however: in my view the use of other alternatives should be biased toward strategies that perform well specifically in inflationary market regimes. That’s the whole point of owning gold here.

Why no credit exposure?

As alluded to above, this exercise was based on the K.I.S.S principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I have mixed feelings about how best to integrate credit in a permanent portfolio. Investment grade credit probably has a home in the bond bucket, though it will introduce a bit more equity-like sensitivity to deflationary conditions.

The lower down the credit quality spectrum you go, or the more you get into hybrid securities like preferred stocks, the more you take on equity-like risk. So to the extent assets such as high-yield debt and bank loans and preferred stocks have a place in the permanent portfolio, it’s actually in the equity bucket.

The permanent portfolio is all about balancing risk exposures in light of their potential patterns of correlation across different macroeconomic and financial market regimes. Asset classes get sorted into buckets based on their historical sensitivities to those regimes and (hopefully) how robust those relationships may prove to be in the future.

This is precisely the same intuition that underlies most flavors of risk parity, including Bridgewater’s famous All-Weather portfolio. The advantage Bridgewater and other large investors have here is that they have access to the full toolbox of financial instruments for portfolio construction. Smaller investors have to hack something together based on the investments they can access.