October 14, 2019: Low Volatility Factor ETFs

by | Oct 15, 2019 | Asset-Allocation, Bonds, Economy, Feature, Gold, Headline, Income, Inv, Investments, IRA, Markets, Mutual-Funds, newsletter, Portfolios, Retirement

Re-balance Cycle Reminder All MyPlanIQ’s newsletters are archived here.

For regular SAA and TAA portfolios, the next re-balance will be on Monday, November 18, 2019. You can also find the re-balance calendar for 2019 on ‘Dashboard‘ page once you log in.

As a reminder to expert users: advanced portfolios are still re-balanced based on their original re-balance schedules and they are not the same as those used in Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation (SAA and TAA) portfolios of a plan.

Please note that we now list the next re-balance date on every portfolio page.

Low Volatility Factor ETFs

We continue our introduction to (smart) factor ETFs. In this newsletter, we will discuss low volatility factor. 

Low volatility stocks

Low volatility stock ETFs came out way before other ‘new’ factor ETFs including momentum and quality. In fact, these ETFs were introduced just after the 2008-2009 financial crisis bear market. Investors, fresh out of a violent market, were looking for something more stable. The so called low volatility factor and its ETFs were thus more welcome at that time. 

Investors usually make a mistake by simply interpreting this factor as a set of stocks with low(est) volatility. This is actually inaccurate. For example, MSCI defines its minimum volatility factor portfolio of stocks as follows: 

Please login or register an account to view the newsletter