Regime Shifts: Implications for Dynamic Strategies

Regime shifts present significant challenges for investors because they cause performance to depart significantly from the ranges implied by long-term averages of means and covariances. But regime shifts also present opportunities for gain. The authors show how to apply Markov-switching models to forecast regimes in market turbulence, inflation, and economic growth. They found that a dynamic process outperformed static asset allocation in backtests, especially for investors who seek to avoid large losses.