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CEFL Still Attractive With 21.9%Yield

My projection of a $0.2758 monthly dividend for CEFL would result in a 21.9% yield on an annualized compounded basis. The weighted average discount to book value for the closed-end funds that comprise CEFL is less than it has been recently, but it is still substantial. The action by UBS to not issue any new notes of its outstanding ETRACS ETNs, which included CEFL, does not impair the credit or liquidity of CEFL. The enormous discount to book value than many of the closed-end funds has lessened somewhat. Last month, all 30 of the index components of the UBS ETRACS Monthly Pay 2xLeveraged Closed-End Fund ETN (NYSEARCA: CEFL ), and the YieldShares High Income ETF (NYSEARCA: YYY ), which is based on the same index and thus has the same components as CEFL, but without the 2X leverage, traded at discounts to book value. They are still trading at discounts to book value now. From the inception of CEFL until two months ago, there were always some component closed-end funds trading at premiums to book value. Two months ago, two of the components were trading at premiums to book value. The discount to book value is not as large as it was a month ago. On a weighted average basis, the closed-end funds that comprise CEFL are trading at a 11.77% discount to book value as of October 23, 2015 as compared to 13.8% a month ago. The median discount for the 30 closed-end funds is 12.41% as compared to 14.25% a month ago. Thus, the case for CEFL based on the large discount to book value still exists, but is less compelling than it was previously. There has been some confusion regarding the decision by UBS AG (NYSE: UBS ) that it does not intend to issue any new notes in 38 of its outstanding ETRACS ETNs. These include CEFL. UBS stated in an October 8, 2015 press release : “…This announcement does not affect the terms of the outstanding Series A ETRACS ETNs identified below, including the right of noteholders to require UBS AG to redeem their notes on the terms, and at the redemption price……. In connection with the previously announced transfer by UBS AG to UBS Switzerland AG of specified assets, UBS Switzerland AG became a co-obligor of all outstanding debt securities designated as Series A, including the Series A ETRACS ETNs, issued by UBS AG prior to the transfer date…” This in no way impairs the rights or liquidity of CEFL and there are now two stated co-obligors for the ETNs, which if anything improves their credit. However, Fidelity now does not allow its customers to buy the Series A ETRACS ETNs. This has caused some confusion and inconvenience for Fidelity customers and some frustration for Fidelity employees who realize this prohibition makes very little sense. However, as far as I know, no other brokerage firm has prohibited its customers from buying the UBS ETNs. Closed-end funds typically trade at either discounts or premiums to book value. On balance, there is a slight bias towards discounts. Because of significant changes in the composition of the index, comparisons of aggregate discounts to book value from previous years are not very meaningful. That said, the 13.8% discount last month was the largest since the inception of CEFL. Six months ago, CEFL had an 8.6% weighted discount to book value. Thus, in just five months, the discount had increased from 8.6% to 13.8%, but has since come down to 11.77% For many securities other than closed-end funds, such as common stocks, discounts or premiums to book values are logically based on the business prospects for companies. Thus, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) trades at significant premium to book value, while Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU ) trades at a significant discount to book value, reflecting differing market perceptions of the future prospects for those companies. Google trades at approximately 5X book value while BTU trades at about one-fifth of book value. In my article: mREITs Impacted By Enormous Price To Book Swing – MORL Yielding 27.6%, I discussed the large discounts to book value that mREITs such as American Capital Agency Corp. (NASDAQ: AGNC ) are trading at. The logic behind mREITs such as AGNC trading at significant discounts to book value is primarily based on the possible impacts of higher future interest rates. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the magnitudes of the discounts or premiums to book for securities such as Google, Peabody and AGNC there are facts and logic related to each company’s business prospects that could possibly explain or justify changes in the premiums or discounts that have occurred in those stocks. There are no such facts or changes in market forecasts of business prospects that can possibly explain or justify changes in the premiums or discounts that have occurred in the closed-end funds that comprise CEFL. For closed-end funds, changes in the premiums or discounts to book value should be solely based on the value that investors place on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the closed-end fund structure, rather than the differing market perceptions of the future prospects for the securities in the closed-end funds’ portfolios. Investors in closed-end funds could purchase the securities held by a closed-end fund themselves. In most cases, there are also open-end funds available to investors that have risk, return and expense characteristics similar to any given closed-end fund. Changes in market perceptions of the prospects of the securities that comprise the portfolios of closed-end funds cannot logically explain or justify any change in the magnitudes of the discounts or premiums to book for the closed-end funds. Any such changes in market perceptions of the prospects of the securities in the portfolio should be reflected in the prices of the portfolio securities themselves. Thus, the ratio of the price of the closed-end fund to its book value should not be related to the expectations of the prospects for the portfolio securities held by the closed-end fund. If investors value the advantages of diversification, management and possibly lower transaction costs associated with owning a closed-end fund rather than owning the individual securities that comprise the closed-end fund’s portfolio more than the fees and expenses, which are the primary negative aspect of closed-end funds, then the closed-end fund will trade at a premium to book value. Conversely, if investors feel that the fees and expenses of the closed-end fund outweigh the advantages of diversification, management and possibly lower transaction cost associated with owning a closed-end fund, it will trade at a discount to book value. The trade-offs between the advantages and disadvantages associated with closed-end funds relative to the securities that comprise the portfolios of the closed-end funds are rational reasons for the closed-end funds to trade at discounts or premiums to book value. However, it is not rational for the discount or premium to be influenced by expectations of future returns on the securities that comprise the portfolios of the closed-end funds. If the market thinks that the securities in a closed-end fund’s portfolio will decline, and thus the net asset or book value of the closed-end fund will decline, there is no reason why the premium or discount that the closed-end fund is trading at should change. Some closed-end funds employ limited amounts of leverage. As investment companies, closed-end funds cannot have more than 33% leverage and most employ less, if any. That a closed-end fund does or does not employ a relatively small amount of leverage should not impact the premium or discount that the closed-end fund is trading at. Leverage is the easiest characteristic of a security to offset. Thus, if an investor was interested in a security but did not like the fact that the security employed 20% leverage, the investor could offset that leverage by combing that security with a risk-free asset. For example, if you had $10,000 to invest and you liked a closed-end fund but were unhappy with the 20% leverage, investing $8,000 in the closed-end fund and $2,000 in a risk-free asset will result in the same risk/return profile as investing $10,000 in the same closed-end fund, if that fund did not employ any leverage. Likewise, if you liked a closed-end fund but would rather that fund employed more leverage, you can buy that fund on margin and get in the same risk/return profile as investing in the fund if it had more leverage. Thus, leverage or lack of leverage should not influence the premium or discount that the closed-end fund is trading at since any leverage in a closed-end fund can be offset by an investor. There should be some limits as to how far away from book value a closed-end fund should trade. If a closed-end fund is trading at a sufficiently high premium to book value, an arbitrage opportunity could exist. Buying the securities in the closed-end fund’s portfolio and simultaneously selling the closed-end fund should generate a profitable arbitrage. Likewise if a closed-end fund is trading at a large enough discount, buying the closed-end fund and selling the securities that comprise the portfolio, it could generate arbitrage profits. These types of arbitrage would be risk arbitrage as opposed to riskless arbitrage. In riskless arbitrage, one buys a security or commodity and simultaneously sells something that is the equivalent of what you sold. An example of riskless arbitrage would be after a merger had been approved in which the acquirer is issuing one share of its stock for two shares of the company being acquired, you simultaneously buy two shares of the company being acquired for a total cost less than a share of the acquirer. This would essentially lock in a profit that would be realized when the merger closed and the values converged. Attempting to take advantage of the discount to book value being irrationally wide for a closed-end fund would be an example of risk arbitrage since there is no terminal event that will make the value of what you buy converge with what you sell. It may be irrational for a closed-end fund to trade at a 10% discount to book value. However, there is always the possibility that it could go to a 15% discount. As Keynes famously said, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Closed-end funds do not usually provide convenient opportunities for explicit risk arbitrage transactions where one security is bought and the other security is shorted. Retail investors usually cannot use the proceeds from selling some securities short to buy other securities. Hedge funds and institutions that may be able to use the proceeds from selling some securities short to buy others might find closed-end funds, and especially some of the securities that comprise the portfolios of the closed-end funds, not liquid enough to trade in. Even market participants who are able to use the proceeds from selling some securities short to buy others might be dissuaded from buying closed-end funds and shorting the securities in the closed-end funds’ portfolio, because of the fees and expenses charged by the closed-end funds. However, if the discount to book value is large enough, the fees and expenses charged by the closed-end funds could be offset by the discount to book value and thus generate a positive carry for a long closed-end fund — short the fund’s portfolio position. This would be especially true for closed-end funds that specialize in securities that generate higher income, such as those in the index upon which CEFL and its unleveraged counterpart YYY are based. An example of the discount to book value more than offsetting the fees and expenses would be a hypothetical closed-end fund whose portfolio securities yielded 10% before expenses. Most income-oriented closed-end funds have expense ratios lower than 1%. Shorting $100 worth of the securities that comprise the fund would require payments of $10 representing 10% annually to those who the securities were borrowed from. The $100 proceeds from the short sale could be used to acquire $100 of the closed-end fund. If the closed-end fund was trading at a 14% discount, $100 of the fund would represent 100/.86 = $116.28 worth of the securities in the fund. These securities yield 10%, so the gross income from the fund position would be $11.63. The net income, assuming a 1% expense ratio, would be $10.63. Thus, even after expenses and fees, an account long the closed-end fund would generate higher income than the portfolio securities while it waited for the discount to narrow to realize the risk arbitrage profit. While explicit risk arbitrage where the portfolio securities are shorted and the proceeds are employed to buy the closed-end fund might not occur in significant quantities to narrow the discount to book value, implicit arbitrage should eventually have an impact. Implicit risk arbitrage would occur as investors holding or wanting to hold securities with similar risk/return characteristics as a closed-end fund or the portfolios held by the closed-end fund shift from other securities to the closed-end fund. Institutional investors who had portfolios that contained securities similar to or identical to those held in a close-end fund could improve their risk/return profile by shifting out of securities in the closed-end fund to the closed-end fund, if the discount to book value for the closed-end fund was large enough. Retail investors could switch from securities held in portfolios of close-end fund to the closed-end fund and improve their risk/return profile if the discount to book value for the closed-end fund was large enough. More important, investors could shift out open-end mutual funds into closed-end mutual funds with similar objectives and portfolios. Open-end mutual funds are sold and redeemed at net asset value. Thus, there is never any discount or premium to book value for an open-end mutual fund. Advantages for investors in no-load mutual funds are that there are no transactions costs and the funds can always be redeemed at net asset or book value. Closed-end funds usually require some brokerage commission to buy and sell them, and there is risk that the closed-end fund will fluctuate due to changes in the premium or discount to net asset value in addition to fluctuation in the portfolio securities. The advantages of no-load open-end mutual funds are somewhat offset by the lower fees and expenses that closed-end funds usually have. When closed-end funds are trading at large discounts to book value, investors can significantly increase their returns by switching from open-end funds to closed-end funds that have similar assets but are selling at discounts to net asset value and typically have lower fees and expenses. When an investor redeems an open-end fund at net asset value, the open-end fund sells portfolio securities to fund the redemption. That would tend to lower the market prices of those portfolio securities. If the investor uses the proceeds from the redemption of the open-end fund to buy shares in a closed-end fund that holds similar portfolio securities, the net effect would be to put downward pressure on the market prices of the portfolio securities and upward pressure of the market prices of the closed-end funds. Thus, the discount to book value for the closed-end funds will tend to decline. This large discount to net asset value alone is still a good reason to be constructive on CEFL. Although with the discount receding, the case is not as compelling as previously. It should be noted that saying CEFL components are now trading at a deeper discount to the net asset value of the closed-end funds that comprise the index does not mean that CEFL does not always trade at a level close to its own net asset value. Since CEFL is exchangeable at the holders’ option at indicative or net asset value, its market price will not deviate significantly from the net asset value. The net asset value or indicative value of CEFL is determined by the market prices of the closed-end funds that comprise the index upon which CEFL is based. My constructive view on CEFL stems not only from the wide discount to book value of the closed-end funds, but also from the very large dividends paid by CEFL. One troubling aspect of CEFL is the significant amount of the dividends paid by the closed-end funds that comprise CEFL that consists of return of capital. My calculation using available data indicates that 18.5% of the November CEFL dividend will consist of return of capital. Another caveat is that, as is shown in the table below, some of the closed-end funds have not officially declared their monthly dividends with ex-dates in October 2015. All of those have declared the same monthly dividend for at least the last five months. I have assumed they will declare the same dividend in October as they did in the last five months. Of the 30 index components of CEFL, and YYY, which is based on the same index and thus has the same components as CEFL, but without the 2X leverage, 29 now pay monthly. Only the Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund (NYSE: EDD ) now pays quarterly dividends in January, April, October, and July. Thus, EDD will not be included in the November 2015 CEFL monthly dividend calculation. My calculation projects an November 2015 dividend of $0.2758. This is an decrease of 6.1% from the September 2015 dividend of $0.2938, which also did not include any contribution from EDD. While the 2014 year-end rebalancing has reduced the monthly CEFL dividend, it is still very large. For the three months ending November 2015, the total projected dividends are $0.8733. The annualized dividends would be $3.4932. This is a 20.0% simple annualized yield with CEFL priced at $17.49. On a monthly compounded basis, the effective annualized yield is 21.9%. Aside from the fact that with a yield above 20%, even without reinvesting or compounding, you get back your initial investment in only five years and still have your original investment shares intact. If someone thought that over the next five years markets and interest rates would remain relatively stable, and thus CEFL would continue to yield 21.9% on a compounded basis, the return on a strategy of reinvesting all dividends would be enormous. An investment of $100,000 would be worth $269,233 in five years. More interestingly, for those investing for future income, the income from the initial $100,000 would increase from the $21,900 initial annual rate to $58,962 annually. CEFL component weights as of as of September 30, 2015, prices as of October 23, 2015 Name Ticker Weight Price NAV price/NAV ex-div dividend frequency contribution return of capital First Trust Intermediate Duration Prf.& Income Fd FPF 4.91 21.72 23.56 0.9219 10/01/2015 0.1625 q 0.0128 Eaton Vance Limited Duration Income Fund EVV 4.55 13.15 15.11 0.8703 10/8/2015 0.1017 m 0.0123 MFS Charter Income Trust MCR 4.49 8.2 9.36 0.8761 10/13/2015 0.06276 m 0.0120 0.0628 Doubleline Income Solutions DSL 4.45 17.9 20.04 0.8932 10/14/2015 0.15 m 0.0130 Blackrock Corporate High Yield Fund HYT 4.4 10.37 11.82 0.8773 10/13/2015 0.07 m 0.0104 0.0012 Clough Global Opportunities Fund GLO 4.38 11.31 13.02 0.8687 10/14/2015 0.1 m 0.0135 PIMCO Dynamic Credit Income Fund PCI 4.34 18.9 21.8 0.8670 10/7/2015 0.164063 m 0.0132 Prudential Global Short Duration High Yield Fundd GHY 4.33 14.53 16.59 0.8758 10/14/2015 0.11 m 0.0115 Alpine Total Dynamic Dividend AOD 4.27 8.04 9.47 0.8490 9/21/2015 0.0575 m 0.0107 Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Global Diversified Equity Income Fund EXG 4.23 9.15 9.97 0.9178 10/21/2015 0.0813 m 0.0131 0.0659 Alpine Global Premier Properties Fund AWP 4.18 6.22 7.32 0.8497 9/21/2015 0.05 m 0.0118 Western Asset Emerging Markets Debt Fund ESD 4.13 14.37 17.06 0.8423 10/21/2015 0.105 m 0.0106 0.0146 Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Diversified Equity Income Fund ETY 4.13 11.3 12.04 0.9385 10/21/2015 0.0843 m 0.0108 ING Global Equity Dividend & Premium Opportunity Fund IGD 4.04 7.69 8.6 0.8942 10/1/2015 0.076 m 0.0140 0.0266 BlackRock International Growth and Income Trust BGY 3.86 6.55 7.17 0.9135 10/13/2015 0.049 m 0.0101 0.0417 GAMCO Global Gold Natural Resources & Income Trust GGN 3.75 5.84 6.21 0.9404 10/14/2015 0.07 m 0.0157 Prudential Short Duration High Yield Fd ISD 3.5 14.87 17.01 0.8742 10/14/2015 0.11 m 0.0091 Aberdeen Aisa-Pacific Income Fund FAX 3.39 4.74 5.59 0.8479 10/19/2015 0.035 m 0.0088 0.0147 Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund EDD 3.37 7.57 9.04 0.8374 9/28/2015 0.22 q MFS Multimarket Income Trust MMT 3 5.88 6.75 0.8711 10/13/2015 0.04517 m 0.0081 0.0452 Calamos Global Dynamic Income Fund CHW 2.89 7.71 8.76 0.8801 10/7/2015 0.07 m 0.0092 Backstone /GSO Strategic Credit Fund BGB 2.78 14.38 16.76 0.8580 9/21/2015 0.105 m 0.0071 0.0012 Blackrock Multi-Sector Income BIT 2.15 16.34 18.95 0.8623 10/13/2015 0.1167 m 0.0054 Western Asset High Income Fund II HIX 2.09 6.86 7.59 0.9038 10/21/2015 0.069 m 0.0074 0.0006 Allianzgi Convertible & Income Fund NCV 1.86 6.38 6.96 0.9167 10/8/2015 0.065 m 0.0066 Wells Fargo Advantage Multi Sector Income Fund ERC 1.75 12.03 14.07 0.8550 9/11/2015 0.0967 m 0.0049 0.0283 Wells Fargo Advantage Income Opportunities Fund EAD 1.38 7.86 8.91 0.8822 9/11/2015 0.068 m 0.0042 Nuveen Preferred Income Opportunities Fund JPC 1.29 9.28 10.26 0.9045 10/13/2015 0.067 m 0.0033 Allianzgi Convertible & Income Fund II NCZ 1.15 5.69 6.2 0.9177 10/8/2015 0.0575 m 0.0041 Invesco Dynamic Credit Opportunities Fund VTA 0.98 10.87 12.55 0.8661 10/13/2015 0.075 m 0.0024

Dead-Cat Bounce Or Continued Bull Market? How To Invest If You’re Uncertain

Summary Financial pundits disagree, as usual. No one knows what the future holds. One way of dealing with uncertainty is to stay invested while protecting yourself against intolerable losses. We present a way for investors to do that while maximizing their potential returns. Before the market opened on Wednesday, Mark Hulbert offered a reason to be bullish in a post on Market Watch (“This Stock Market Gauge Predicts Double-Digit Gain For S&P 500″). The gauge Hulbert referred to was a combination of the market’s P/E ratio and the ” Misery Index “, which is the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates. According to Hulbert, the current level is associated with historic annualized stock returns of 13.2%, as indicated in the chart below, which Hulbert included in his column. (click to enlarge) After U.S. markets surged to ~4% gains on Wednesday, following six days of losses, John Auther of the Financial Times, in his video note (“Correction Foretold”) suggested the day’s market action was a “classic dead cat bounce”, and argued that a renewed bull market would depend on a renewal of earnings momentum, which has effectively run out of steam, as the chart he shared below indicates. (click to enlarge) Dealing With Uncertainty One way to deal with this sort of uncertainty is to invest in a handful of securities you think will do well, and hedge against the possiblity that you end up being wrong. That approach is systematized in the hedged portfolio method, which we detailed in a previous post (“Backtesting The Hedged Portfolio Method”). Below we’ll recap how you can built a hedged portfolio yourself, and present an example of a hedged portfolio created for an investor with $100,000 to invest who can’t tolerate a drawdown of more than 15%. Risk Tolerance, Hedging Cost, and Potential Return All else equal, with a hedged portfolio, the greater an investor’s risk tolerance — the greater the maximum drawdown he is willing to risk (his “threshold”) — the lower his hedging cost will be and the higher his expected return will be. In a previous post (“Keeping A Small Nest Egg From Cracking”), we created a hedged portfolio for a small investor who could tolerate a drawdown of as much as 20%. In this case, with an investor who can only tolerate a 15% drawdown, we would expect a lower potential return. Constructing A Hedged Portfolio The process, in broad strokes, is this: Find securities with high potential returns (we define potential return as a high-end, bullish estimate of how the security will perform). Find securities that are relatively inexpensive to hedge. Buy a handful of securities that score well on the first two criteria; in other words, buy a handful of securities with high potential returns net of their hedging costs (or, ones with high net potential returns). Hedge them. The potential benefits of this approach are twofold: If you are successful at the first step (finding securities with high potential returns), and you hold a concentrated portfolio of them, your portfolios should generate decent returns over time. If you are hedged, and your return estimates are completely wrong, on occasion — or the market moves against you — your downside will be strictly limited. How to Implement This Approach Finding securities with high potential returns. For this, you can use Seeking Alpha Pro , among other sources. Seeking Alpha articles often include price targets for long ideas, and you can convert these to percentage returns from current prices. But you’ll need to use the same time frame for each of your expected return calculations to facilitate comparisons of expected returns, hedging costs, and net expected returns. Our method starts with calculations of six-month potential returns. Finding securities that are relatively inexpensive to hedge. For this step, you’ll need to find hedges for the securities with high potential returns, and then calculate the hedging cost as a percentage of position value for each security. Whatever hedging method you use, for this example, you’d want to make sure that each security is hedged against a greater-than-15% decline over the time frame covered by your potential return calculations. Our method attempts to find optimal static hedges using collars as well as protective puts. Buying securities that score well on the first two criteria. In order to determine which securities these are, you may need to first adjust your potential return calculations by the time frame of your hedges. For example, although our method initially calculates six-month potential returns and aims to find hedges with six months to expiration, in some cases the closest hedge expiration may be five months out. In those cases, we will adjust our potential return calculation down accordingly, because we expect an investor will exit the position shortly before the hedge expires (in general, our method and calculations are based on the assumption that an investor will hold his shares for six months, until shortly before their hedges expire or until they are called away, whichever comes first). Next, you’ll need to subtract the hedging costs you calculated in the previous step from the potential returns you calculated for each position, and sort the securities by their potential returns net of hedging costs, or net potential returns. The securities that come to the top of that sort are the ones you’ll want to consider for your portfolio. Fine-tuning portfolio construction. You’ll want to stick with round lots (numbers of shares divisible by 100) to minimize hedging costs, so if you’re going to include a handful of securities from the sort in the previous step and you have a relatively small portfolio, you’ll need to take into account the share prices of the securities. Stocks such as Priceline.com (NASDAQ: PCLN ), trading at more than $1200 per share, wouldn’t work in a $100,000 hedged portfolio, because the investor wouldn’t be able to purchase one round lot. Another fine-tuning step is to minimize cash that’s leftover after you make your initial allocation to round lots of securities and their respective hedges. Because each security is hedged, you won’t need a large cash position to reduce risk. And since returns on cash are so low now, by minimizing cash you can potentially boost returns. In this step, our method searches for what we call a “cash substitute”: that’s a security collared with a tight cap (1% or the current yield on a leading money market fund, whichever is higher) in an attempt to capture a better-than-cash return while keeping the investor’s downside limited according to his specifications. You could use a similar approach, or you could simply allocate leftover cash to one of the securities you selected in the previous step. Calculating An Expected Return. While net potential returns are bullish estimates of how well securities will perform, net of their hedging costs, expected returns, in our terminology, are the more likely returns net of hedging costs. In a series of 25,412 backtests over an 11 year time period, we determined two things about our method of calculating potential returns: it generates alpha, and it overstates actual returns. The average actual return over the next six months in those 25,412 tests was 0.3x the average potential return calculated ahead of time. So, we use that empirically derived relationship to calculate our expected returns. Example Hedged Portfolio Here is an example of a hedged portfolio created using the general process described above by the automated portfolio construction tool at Portfolio Armor . With that tool, you just enter the dollar amount you are looking to invest and the largest drawdown you are willing to risk (your “threshold” — in this case, 15%), and the tool does the rest. This portfolio was generated as of Wednesday’s close (results will vary at different times, depending on market conditions), and used as its inputs the parameters we mentioned for our hypothetical investor above: a $100,000 to invest, and a goal of maximizing potential return while limiting downside risk, in the worst-case scenario, to a drawdown of no more than 15%. Worst Case Scenario The “Max Drawdown” column in the portfolio level summary shows the worst case scenario for this hedged portfolio. If every security in it went to zero before the hedges expired, the portfolio would decline 14.28%. Negative Hedging Cost Although minimizing hedging cost was only the secondary goal here after maximizing potential return, note that, in this case, the total hedging cost for the portfolio was negative, -0.70%, meaning the investor would receive more income in total from selling the call legs of the collars on his positions than he spent buying the put legs. Best Case Scenario At the portfolio level, the net potential return is 11.76% (as predicted, it’s less than the potential return for the 20% threshold portfolio we alluded to above, which was 17.79%). This represents the best case scenario, if each underlying security in the portfolio meets or exceeds its potential return. A More Likely Scenario The portfolio level expected return of 4.30% represents a more conservative estimate, based on the historical relationship between our calculated potential returns and actual returns. Each Security Is Hedged Note that in the portfolio above, each of the five underlying securities – Foot Locker (NYSE: FL ), Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX ), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX ), the ProShares UltraShort QQQ ETF (NYSEARCA: QID ), and Sketchers (NYSE: SKX ) is hedged. Hedging each security according to the investor’s risk tolerance obviates the need for broad diversification, and lets him concentrate his assets in a handful of securities with high potential returns net of their hedging costs. Here’s a closer look at the hedge for one of these positions, HOLX: As you can see in first part of the image above, HOLX is hedged with an optimal collar with its cap set at 17.44%, which was the potential return Portfolio Armor calculated for the stock: the idea is to capture the potential return while offsetting the cost of hedging by selling other investors the right to buy HOLX if it appreciates beyond that over the next six months.[i] The cost of the put leg of this collar was $1250, or 6.46% of position value, but, as you can see in the image below, the income from the short call leg was $425, or 2.2% as percentage of position value. Since the income from the call leg offset some of the cost of the put leg, the net cost of the optimal collar on HOLX was $825, or 4.26% of position value.[ii] Note that, although the cost of the hedge on this position was positive, the hedging cost of this portfolio as a whole was negative . Why These Particular Securities? Foot Locker, Hologic, Netflix, and Sketchers shares were included as primary securities in this portfolio because, as of Wednesday’s close, they were all among the top securities in Portfolio Armor’s universe when ranked by net potential return, and they had lower share prices than other securities similarly highly ranked. Recall from our discussion above about fine-tuning portfolio construction, that it can be difficult to fit round lots of securities with higher share prices in smaller portfolios. Regarding the inclusion of the inverse ETF QID as a cash substitute here, note that Portfolio Armor is agnostic about whether a security is a stock, ETF or inverse ETF when it ranks them by potential return and hedging cost. QID was included as a cash substitute because it had one of the highest net potential returns when hedged as a cash substitute. Possibly More Protection Than Promised In some cases, hedges such as the ones in the portfolio above can provide more protection than promised. For an example of that, see this recent instablog post on hedging Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA ). Hedged Portfolios For Investors With Lower Risk Tolerance The hedged portfolio shown above was designed for a small investor who could tolerate a decline of as much as 15% over the next six months, but the same process can be used for investors who are more risk averse, willing to risk drawdowns of as little as 2%. Notes: [i] This hedge actually expires in a little more than 7 months, but the expected returns are based on the assumption that an investor will hold his positions for six months, until they are called away or until shortly before their hedges expire, whichever comes first. [ii] To be conservative, the net cost of the collar was calculated using the bid price of the calls and the ask price of the puts. In practice, an investor can often sell the calls for a higher price (some price between the bid and ask) and he can often buy the puts for less than the ask price (again, at some price between the bid and ask). So, in practice, the cost of this collar would likely have been lower. Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. (More…) I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.