Are traditional labels becoming less important for multi-asset funds?

Are traditional labels becoming less important for multi-asset funds?

Brendan Walsh, multi-asset fund manager at Aviva Investors, explores if ignoring traditional asset class labels and focusing on risk and multi-strategy investment concepts, allows managers more freedom and could help improve fund returns as well.

As the market embraces risk premia, risk parity, and multi-strategy funds, is the concept of asset allocation fast becoming an anachronism? These approaches ignore traditional asset class labels, choosing instead to focus on how specific strategies or risks interact. While absolute return investing highlighted the benefit of ditching benchmarks and moving towards delivering an outcome whatever the environment, multi-strategy and risk factor approaches go one step further. They ignore asset class distinctions for a truly unconstrained approach. However, in order to run a multi-strategy...