Factor Investing in Liability-Driven and Goal-Based Investment Solutions

Summary:

A new approach known as factor investing has recently emerged in investment practice, which recommends that allocation decisions be expressed in terms of risk factors, as opposed to standard asset class decompositions. While the relevance of factor investing is now widely accepted amongst sophisticated institutional investors, an ambiguity remains with respect to the exact role that risk factors are expected to play in an asset-liability management investment process.

The main objective of this paper is precisely to contribute to the acceptance of factor investing by providing useful pedagogical clarification with respect to the benefits of factor investing within the liability-driven investing paradigm.

To this end, we draw an important distinction between the benefits of factor investing in the performance-seeking portfolio and its benefits in the liability-hedging portfolio.

We also argue that adopting a factor investing lens offers new useful insights with respect to the improvement of the interaction between performance-seeking and liability-hedging portfolios. Overall, our paper can be regarded as a first step towards the introduction of a comprehensive investment framework blending liability-driven and factor investing, widely recognized as the two most significant advances in institutional money management over the last two decades