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2019/06/26
Market Insight - The appeal of low volatility strategies

By Marco Bonaviri - Senior Portfolio Manager

Looking back, we realise that the bull market that began in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis is now nearer its end than the beginning. This has reawakened an appetite for defensive equity strategies after more than 10 years of an almost uninterrupted run in prices. People have offered many definitions of a defensive equity strategy, but we prefer to focus on what these strategies are designed to achieve, namely a reduction in volatility and maximum drawdown with risk-adjusted outperformance. This is precisely the goal of low volatility, or Low Vol, strategies.