We thought we would review the cold, hard data on the financial year 2022 that came to an end on June 30. The data tables paint a clear picture: companies priced on high multiples coming into the year faced a sobering reassessment of their valuations, as did unprofitable businesses; the only safe haven was the energy/commodities complex; small stocks were shunned by nervous investors, and the tech sector was particularly under pressure.

The difference between high EV/EBITDA and low EV/EBITDA stocks in our "FIT" universe was the most stark - an 18% differential in price returns (where we split stocks into three baskets - low, middle and high).

Five of the worst six performed stocks were in the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) space, led by merger partners Sezzle (SZL) and Zip Co (Z1P) in first and third. The best returns came from an eclectic mix: heart device company Anteris (AVR) and  heavy equipment maintenance business Mader Group (MAD).

Some of the less obvious takeaways from our "FIT" universe were that:  it was not the case that the "dogs" of the prior year were the place to be - the "middle-of-the-road" stocks from FY21 held up best in FY22; and companies with market caps between $750m and $2 billion suffered notably worse declines than those capped under $100m.

The wash-up from FY22 is that we are now seeing more attractive valuations AND the recapitalisation opportunities we have been highlighting are beginning to flow. For bottom-up investors like Equitable Investors, we believe the opportunity set will be as rich as it has been in many years and we are keen to engage with investors who want to be part of this "recap" opportunity through Dragonfly Fund.

What is Convexity & Why Is It Important?

When credit instruments sell off, market participants will often talk about convexity being back. So, what is it?

Convexity can involve complex mathematics; however, a simple way to describe the concept is that it occurs where risk and reward are asymmetrical: positive convexity refers to an investment with more upside than downside; while negative convexity means the downside is greater than the upside.

During a risk-off environment, the price of a credit instrument typically drops below its nominal value (also referred to as "face" or "par" value) due to perceived increased default risk. As illustrated by the example in Chart 1 below, there is a compelling investment opportunity when a bond trades at a discount to its nominal value - assuming the bond does not default, a bond's price will benefit from a natural "pull" to the nominal value as it approaches maturity. This movement is referred to as "pull-to-par". Typically, bonds and loans that trade at a discount have positive convexity, offering investors enhanced yield and capital appreciation potential without taking excess risk.

Market Opportunity - Convexity & Higher Yields

Calendar year 2022 has presented significant turmoil for global financial markets amid a risk-off environment and sustained macro uncertainty. Global inflationary pressures continue to persist, including the ongoing war in Ukraine, slowing growth, higher energy prices and supply-chain disruptions. Central banks face substantial challenges as they look to combat elevated inflation with interest rate hikes, but without triggering a recession. Against the backdrop of wider spreads and the sell-off in rates over the past few months, fixed income yields have reset to higher levels, presenting an attractive opportunity for yield-focused investors. Global leveraged credit assets are providing a meaningful pickup in real yields when compared to traditional fixed income markets, as illustrated in Chart 2.

Higher yields and a decline in asset prices have introduced greater upside convexity in leveraged credit
markets for total return investors, particularly for high yield bonds. As illustrated in Chart 3, the proportion of the U.S. high yield market currently trading below par has climbed towards levels not seen since March 2020. Further, headline high yield prices have only been lower than their current levels for approximately 5% of the time over the past 10 years. With convexity in high yield bonds' favour, there's greater upside potential than downside risk as borrowing costs continue to rise.

This combination of higher yields and cheaper prices in an environment where bouts of volatility have become shorter and more frequent, is presenting alpha generating opportunities for active managers. History suggests investing in periods of dislocation, when yields reach current levels, provides attractive forward returns in the high yield bond and bank loan markets.

Market Outlook
Despite elevated volatility within financial markets this year, default rates remain below 1% and are tracking near historical lows. We do expect default rates to modestly increase moving forward given tighter monetary conditions and slowing growth. That said, even if we hit a recession in the next 12-24 months, we don't expect default rates to come close to the highs experienced in previous dislocations and anticipate they'll remain below historical averages. Expectations for a benign default outlook are supported by (1) healthy corporate balance sheets, (2) maturity walls that have been pushed out over the past year, and (3) leverage levels that are below historical averages.

Looking forward, we expect volatility to persist with the potential for asset coverage leakage and an uneven recovery across markets. We believe credit spreads are currently at levels that represent attractive entry points, but tail risks have increased, and we anticipate elevated credit dispersion as well as rising idiosyncratic credit events driven by a host of conflicting themes. We believe Ares is well positioned to provide superior credit selection and vigilant risk management in today's volatile market due to our disciplined investment process that focuses on capital preservation, predicated on bottom-up fundamental research with the goal of minimizing default risk by identifying and avoiding marginal quality credit. This core tenet of Ares' investment philosophy has resulted in significantly lower defaults in its bank loan and high yield bond strategies, particularly in periods of dislocation.

In summary, as investors are faced with rising rates and elevated inflation, many may struggle to determine how best to position their credit exposure in an effort to maximize yield and mitigate risk. At Ares, our differentiated approach to capitalizing on the best risk-adjusted return opportunities across the investable universe is rooted in the scale and integration of our Global Liquid and Alternative Credit strategies, which allows us to fully leverage extensive research and origination capabilities, proprietary technologies and longstanding relationships.

Written By Teiki Benveniste, Head of Ares Australia Management

Including tail hedging in a portfolio can have the following benefits:

1. Provide a cushion against very large losses;
2. Allow investors to increase risk in other parts of the portfolio;
3. Provide liquidity during times of market stress.

Point 3 may be of particular interest to Australian super funds where, for example, FX hedges can incur large mark-to-market losses during times of market stress. For example, the latest Quarterly Superannuation Statistics published by APRA (March 2022) show the industry currently has $322bn of FX hedges. During the financial crisis AUD dropped 37.6%, which would have led to FX hedge losses of -$121bn based on current exposures at a time the overall portfolio was down -26% (-$577bn in today's terms), and a COVID scenario would result in FX losses of around -$58bn at a time overall assets were down -$466bn.

Investors use a variety of approaches to try and mitigate losses in their portfolios, including diversification, market timing, and explicit hedging. While we agree all three approaches have a place in managing portfolios, hedging is by far the most reliable way to mitigate losses during times of market stress. It (almost) goes without saying that even investors who successfully add long-term alpha for their clients via market timing cannot always predict market drawdowns, and one only needs to look at recent market moves to see the pitfalls of relying too heavily on diversification (eg simultaneous sell-off in equities and fixed income with ACWI -18.9% and Global Agg -14.5% YTD on a total return basis).

Because it is reliable, hedging can be an important tool in building resilient long-term portfolios. However, that reliability comes at a cost, and because true market stress events are few and far between, we often find that the costs of hedging are more visible to investors than the benefits. Since most investors are not particularly concerned by small drawdowns, the cost of hedging can be reduced by focusing only on larger, less-frequent drawdowns. Specifically, tail hedging allows investors to hedge against only the most extreme outcomes that can inflict long-lasting damage on even the most diversified portfolios.

It's worth reiterating that because tail hedging, by design, is only expected to 'work' in the most extreme circumstances, investors can expect to see (modest) losses in tail hedges far more frequently than they will see gains. However, it is the timing and magnitude of the gains that is important. A robust tail hedging program will provide investors with large gains when other parts of the portfolio are experiencing very large drawdowns. And that knowledge may also allow investors to adopt a barbell approach and take higher risk, and earn higher returns, elsewhere in the portfolio. One final point: to be reliable, a tail hedge needs to be "always on" since the whole point of hedging is that we can't always predict a drawdown. In this regard, systematic option strategies can be particularly useful.

In addition to the FX exposures outlined previously, an additional liquidity drain may come in the form of capital calls on private equity commitments. The super industry currently has approximately $106bn exposure to private equity. Some basic assumptions (1) lead to a rough estimate of $11bn liquidity required in a crisis year. Further liquidity needs might reasonably be expected to arise from such things as capital raising (eg rights issues) from portfolio companies, investment opportunities in real estate, infrastructure etc arising from market and/or funding stress. The main point is that super funds can expect to have high liquidity obligations that are required (or desired) to be met during times of market turmoil, on our calculations as much as 6% of fund assets, and possibly much more.

A super fund could budget for this by setting aside some amount to be held in low risk, highly liquid instruments such as cash, ready to be deployed in times of stress. However, such an approach has an opportunity cost because the return on cash is much lower than the return on the rest of the portfolio. Using the past 15y years as a rough guide, a cash investment would have returned 2.6%p.a. vs approximately 5%p.a. for a typical balanced super portfolio. The last 10y would have been an even larger difference (1.5% vs 8%). The chart below shows the performance of a systematic tail hedge strategy(2) (light blue line) compared to the realised opportunity cost of holding an additional 6% of fund assets in cash (purple line) and the projected constant opportunity cost of holding cash (dark blue line).

The chart shows the long-term performance impact of running a tail hedge strategy can be substantially less than holding additional cash in the portfolio. The mark-to-market of the tail hedging program would need to be met over time, but the chart shows that the realised negative performance during "normal" periods is no more than the drag on performance from holding excess cash, and during stress periods the tail hedging realises large gains which can be used to meet any liquidity requirements. For the specific objective of providing liquidity during a crisis, we find an effective tail hedging program to be a more efficient approach despite the perceived "cost" of hedging.

1 10y fund life, 5y investment phase with capital called evenly, investment realisations of zero in a market crisis.

2 The example strategy is a SPX 3m 1×4 20d/5d put spread rolled monthly.