ALGOSAVE offers to bond – and credit – investors its proprietary selection of the most high-yielding and risk-return efficient bond issuers and credit portfolios.
Directly from ALGOSAVE proprietary issuer database, bundled with peace of mind and BANG ON investors risk-return target.
ALGOSAVE carefully – and fully automated – selected credit portfolios are based on ALGOSAVE proprietary FINancial TECHnology which leverages three innovative concepts, borrowed from the banking industry :
- Bond issuer Expected Credit Loss & Expected Return : ALGOSAVE proprietary financial technology selects the most risk-return efficient corporate bond issuers using their respective Expected Credit Loss & their respective Expected-Return term structure. ALGOSAVE ECL handily merges 2 credit-specific risk metrics : Probability and Default (PD) and Loss Given Default (LGD) term structure.
Issuers must also first pass thru ALGOSAVE proprietary stringent selection process which protects investors while also allowing them to reach out for high-yielding assets with greater peace of mind. For instance, even a “CCC+” rated 5-year corporate bond – with its 11% credit spread above risk free rate – also appears on ALGOSAVE issuer radar screen. - Portfolio Expected Loss : ALGOSAVE proprietary FINancial TECHnology builds risk/return efficient high-yielding bond portfolios using the Expected Loss concept. The EL is instrumental in (a) creating investor specific and optimal risk-return asset allocation as well as (b) nourishing an informed dialogue between investors and their investment/financial advisers.
- Putting issuers and portfolios thru ALGOSAVE proprietary stress-testing technology, ALGOSAVE offers high-yielding, diversified and risk-return efficient bond portfolios for investors with high, average and low risk appetite.
1 – Background.
Many tools and platforms have been developed to build efficient financial assets portfolios.
Those traditional tools are founded on some variation of Nobel prize winning Markowitz efficient frontier which selects asset portfolio based on their risk/return profile : the famous Efficient Frontier.
However, and in addition to typical Markowitz volatility of portfolio return, bond-portfolio investments are also sensitive to their asset-class specific risks : (1) a credit downgrade and (2) a full-blown bankruptcy.
a – The first one – a credit downgrade – may force bond investors to sell.
Indeed, should a bond issuer credit rating move beyond their investment constraints (e.g high grade only) they will have to sell its bond and reinvest their proceeds – at a loss – into an investment policy compliant bond. This risk of downgrade is directly – and usually ahead of time – reflected in the bond-issuer Probability of Default term structure (PD)
b – The second one – a full blown bankruptcy – will force bond investors to “go to” recovery together with the other stakeholders with equal seniority ranking. The loss here is BIG. It is best measured by issuer and seniority specific Loss Given Default term structure (LGD)
Some attempts to tackle these missing bond-specific risk metrics have been made where credit quality proxies such as credit rating or/and typical leverage ratio – NetDebt/Ebitda or FFO/NetDebt – are used as run-of-the-mill measures for credit and bankruptcy risk.
Unfortunately those proxies are not completely helpful : they are not easily translated into quantifiable risk-measures which in turn can be used in a risk-return bond selection and bond portfolio building.
2 – ALGOSAVE mission : bridge that gap and empower bond investors with a simple, turn-key and efficient bond-portfolio building platform.
Borrowing from BASEL banking regulation framework – ALGOSAVE team is full of former bankers, so it is OK -, ALGOSAVE introduces bond-issuer specific Expected Credit Loss (ECL), and its portfolio-wide equivalent the Expected Loss (EL), as natural candidates for bond and bond portfolio tailor-made risk metrics.
First, let’s define each of them :
a – Expected Credit Loss = Loss Given Default x Probability of Default x Exposure At Default = LGD x PD x EAD
b – Expected Loss = the maximum bond portfolio loss with a chosen degree of confidence.
Nice things about ECL and EL ? Unlike rating or financial ratios, they are easily quantifiable and therefore, they can naturally be used to :
– (1) select risk-return efficient bonds and,
– (2) build risk-return efficient bond portfolio.
Indeed, the ECL merges together quantifiable PD and LGD term structure. This means that it can naturally be used as palatable single bond risk-metric.
In turn, the EL is a powerful tool for 2 reasons :
(a) ALGOSAVE EL in instrumental in creating investor specific and optimal risk-return asset allocation. Indeed, it directly determines the exact quantity of bonds to create optimal diversified portfolio by simply measuring bond portfolio diversification effect. The rest could be invested into other asset classes.
(b) By providing the maximum portfolio loss with a given degree of confidence (95%, 99% and even 99.9%) ALGOSAVE EL nourishes an informed dialogue between investors and their assets managers.
3. Now that we have selected the right bond-specific risk metric, let’s build efficient bond portfolios with ALGOSAVE bond platform.
Now that investors have selected those precious bonds and bond-portfolio specific risk measures (respectively ECL and EL), let’s allocate investors’ hard earned moneys using those metrics.
First Step : Unlike share investors, beside pocketing their bond’s Yield To Maturity (YTM), bond investors enjoy little other upside. After all, as 1997 Nobel Prize Robert C. Merton showed it, bond investors are selling to shareholders a put option on the value of the assets of the bond issuer. Their maximum return is therefore the put option “premium” – a.k.a. the Bond Yield To Maturity – while their downside is unlimited – they can lose 100% of their investment. Doesn’t this requires extra care ?
4. This is why – at ALGOSAVE – bond issuers must go thru tough filters in order to become eligible for investors.
Every bond issuer first goes thru Algosave proprietary scoring technology which selects only those issuers where debt capital valuation and equity capital valuation simultaneously tell the same story. They must also adequately reflect the current risk profile of the corporate. The latter takes into account sales growth – with its past volatility and future sustainability – cash flow generation capacity – with its predictability and stability – operating and financial leverage – with their predictability and model-ability and many more risk parameters.
5. ALGOSAVE tough selection protects investors while also allowing them to reach out for high-yielding bonds with greater peace of mind.
Let’s start by selecting those bonds which will give investors the largest amount of yield per unit of risk. What we call the most efficient bonds.
To achieve this, ALGOSAVE computes the following ratio – also know as Sharpe Ratio – [Expected Bond return – Risk Free Rate] / Expected Bond Risk.
This graphs depicts a selection of 6 bond issuers from ALGOSAVE list of the 22 best risk/return 5-year maturity bonds (from ALGOSAVE bond platform) . The “22” will be explained later on. To the best of our knowledge, it has nothing to do with a “catch 22” 🙂
6. Now that we have sorted those bonds according to their risk-return efficiency, which, and how many bonds do we put in our 5-year portfolio ?
With ALGOSAVE bond platform, answering those 2 questions is simple and straightforward.
Which bonds come into our portfolio ?
We will build our proposed 5-year maturity portfolio by selecting those Sharpe ratio sorted bonds starting form the most efficient bond and going down the list.
How many bonds ?
The objective is to find the optimal number of bonds where the portfolio diversification effect is at its best. This graph shows that this optimal point resides on bond number 22. Of course, this all has to do issuer Probability of Default and LGD as well as with their correlation term structure (PD, LGD and PD-LGD correlation). We have written a few lines about these in those posts here, here, here, and here.
The y-axis of the here-under graph shows the expected credit loss within 5 years expressed in percentage of the initial investment with a portfolio of 1,2,3….123 bonds.
7 – ALGOSAVE proposed portfolio expected return above risk-free rate stands at 6.77% over the next 5 years.
For comparison sake, This is more than double the expected return above risk free rate on a portfolio of US banks over the same period
Let’s first examine the Expected Return of the equally weighted portfolio of those here-above 5-year maturity bonds. For each issuer, the expected return is computed as the survival rate weighted-average of its 5-year YTM. For instance when the 1-year PD = 1%, the survival rate is 99%, and the expected return becomes : Bond YTM x 99%.
As shown in the here-under sample table, the portfolio Expected Return above risk free rate – which is the is average of its constituent bonds Expected Return – is 6.77% over the next 5 years which is, for instance, more than double the expected return above risk free rate on a portfolio of US banks.
8 – From an efficiency point of view, the proposed 5-year portfolio is BANG on target.
The proposed 5-year portfolio is BANG on target. Indeed the portfolio 6.77% Expected Return exactly compensates the portfolio 6.78% Expected Credit Loss at the 99.9% confidence interval. This gives a Sharpe Ratio of 1.
Finally, ALGOSAVE palatable bond portfolio Expected Loss metric is far better suited to measure bond-portfolio Loss – at 50%, 95%, 99% or 99,9% even confidence interval – than credit rating, return volatility or any financial ratio for the matter.
Hence, the portfolio average (expected) credit loss for OECD consensus macro scenario and for ALGOSAVE stress-tested macro scenario are respectively 0.37% and 1.09%. The portfolio maximum losses (at 95% and 99% confidence interval) are respectively 2.66% and 4.27% (in OECD consensus macro scenario) and 5.38% and 9.08% (in ALGOSAVE stress-tested macro scenario).
Conclusion : by mixing together issuer specific credit risk metrics (PD and LGD) as well as their scenario sensitive correlation term-structure , ALGOSAVE bond platform empowers bond-investors with a simple high-yielding and risk-return efficient bond-portfolio building platform. Bundled with peace of mind.
Of course, real-life bond portfolio must be tailor-made to investors risk and return objectives, time horizon, liquidity, tax, legal and unique circumstances.
For a complete list of ALGOSAVE most efficient corporate bond issuers as well as for ALGOSAVE risk-averse and risk-hungry credit portfolios, fill in the following form and send it ! We will graciously send them to you.
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