Astoria’s MARS portfolio remains heavily exposed to commodities (energy, oil, agriculture, metals) and late cycle equities (emerging market equities & FX, international value, international momentum, US large cap banks, US energy equities, & MLPs). We remain heavily diversified across multi-asset risk factors and continue to keep several uncorrelated assets to hedge our portfolio risk.
Astoria made a big, out of consensus call on commodities in late Q4 2017 and thus far it has helped from both a risk and return perspective.
At the moment, certain commodities are providing positive carry which makes them attractive to own from a risk factor perspective. The positive commodity carry works well for us in conjunction with other risk premias we are currently harnessing (beta, value, momentum, quality, trend).
Commodities are the cheapest asset class in the world and they historically were a better hedge to inflation than stocks or bonds. Astoria believes we are in the early stages of a commodity rally.
Investors, central banks, and corporates have purchased directly (or indirectly via financial engineering) over ten trillion dollars worth of stocks and bonds globally since 2009 and commodities are left in the dust. Needless to say, the majority of investors’ portfolios have very little exposure to commodities. We like the asymmetry that commodities provide both outright and in the context of a cross asset, factor-based portfolio such as MARS.
We have published our ETF holdings on our website. If you are interested in viewing our ETF portfolios, we welcome you register on our website and we will grant you access (free of charge). https://www.astoriaadvisors.com/members
Best, John Davi
Founder & CIO of Astoria
For full disclosure, please refer to our website: https://www.astoriaadvisors.com/disclaimer