 Harmful diversification: Evidence from alternative investmentsEmmanouil Platanakis, Athanasios Sakkas and Charles Sutcliffe The British Accounting Review, 2019, vol. 51, issue 1, 1-23 Abstract: Alternative assets have become as important as equities and fixed income in the portfolios of major investors, and so their diversification properties are also important. However, adding five alternative assets (real estate, commodities, hedge funds, emerging markets and private equity) to equity and bond portfolios is shown to be harmful for US investors. We use 19 portfolio models, in conjunction with dummy variable regression, to demonstrate this harm over the 1997–2015 period. This finding is robust to different estimation periods, risk aversion levels, and the use of two regimes. Harmful diversification into alternatives is not primarily due to transactions costs or non-normality, but to estimation risk. This is larger for alternative assets, particularly during the credit crisis which accounts for the harmful diversification of real estate, private equity and emerging markets. Diversification into commodities, and to a lesser extent hedge funds, remains harmful even when the credit crisis is excluded. Keywords: Alternative assets; Diversification; Estimation errors; Transactions costs; Non-normality; Regimes (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bracre:v:51:y:2019:i:1:p:1-23 DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2018.08.003 Access Statistics for this article The British Accounting Review is currently edited by Nathan Lael Joseph and Alan Lowe More articles in The British Accounting Review from Elsevier |
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