TAA Properly Defined

Abstract

Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) has generally been misspecified, oversold, and subsequently underdelivered. Nevertheless, TAA offers a series of highly attractive investment attributes when adviser/client expectations are properly set and the strategy is appropriately positioned as a portion of a comprehensive investor solution. This article’s objective is three-fold. First, to identify the attractive investment attributes of TAA relative to passive buy & hold. Second, to quantify or parameterize these relative advantages so that users can better assess the relevance of TAA for their own specific needs. Third, this article’s last objective is to describe the give-ups or tradeoffs associated with TAA, so that it can be properly understood, communicated, and therefore applied to the correct portion of an investor’s aggregate portfolio.