A Multifactor Perspective on Volatility-Managed Portfolios

Moreira and Muir question the existence of a strong risk-return trade-off by showing that investors can improve performance by reducing exposure to risk factors when their volatility is high. However, Cederburg et al. show that these strategies fail out-of-sample, and Barroso and Detzel show they do not survive transaction costs. We propose a conditional multifactor portfolio that outperforms its unconditional counterpart even out-of-sample and net of costs. Moreover, we show that factor risk prices generally decrease with market volatility. Our results demonstrate that the breakdown of the risk-return trade-off is more puzzling than previously thought.