The events of the past several months have been unsettling for investors. With mounting concerns about a global recession and a near shutdown of the capital markets, the FTSE 100 has delivered its worst YTD return since 1931. The market has been characterised by fear, panic and forced selling, as mutual funds and levered hedge funds face record redemptions. For those that remain in equities, the top objective has been safety, as cash-rich companies have outperformed those with arguably better growth prospects.

In the past fortnight hedge funds have been tarnished with a critical brush by investors and the media. On the one hand due to “disappointing returns” and also the downward spiral in equity prices as well as commodity speculation. These wide sweeping statements are not completely accurate and the activities of a few should not unjustly implicate the industry as a whole.

A year on from the credit crunch it is time to evaluate where portfolios are standing. At first glance it certainly appears to be a gloomy picture. We believe tighter credit conditions, increased defaults on loans and mortgages by consumers and bank write-downs will continue to create a challenging environment in the year ahead.

Through the latter part of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, the UK press was full of reports about the good returns enjoyed by what were termed ‘the barbarians at the gate’ – private equity managers. By taking advantage of freely available and modestly priced lending over the past few years, deals became increasingly leveraged and the market witnessed a wealth of large public-to-private transactions.

The global fixed income markets have seldom offered more attractive opportunities than investors will find in today’s environment. Since the summer of 2007, trading activity has been far from normal in many fixed income sectors as concerns about the US housing market and economy set off a widespread flight from almost every form of credit risk.

In last month’s column, we spoke about diversifying your portfolio to protect it from recent high levels of volatility in the market. This month we focus on one of the most liquid and inefficient markets which can be central to that diversification strategy – currency.

When constructing a portfolio, two main challenges present themselves – picking the right asset classes and then picking the best managers to run those assets. Choosing an asset allocation strategy can help protect you from downside risk as well as helping to ensure that you maximise the benefit from potential upside. Interestingly, diversification is one of the few elements in a portfolio that is also free.

The traditional way of analysing managers has been to measure their tracking error by looking at the volatility of the difference between a portfolio return and its benchmark index return. This works with managers who take a thematic approach to their fund. But a fund which is a pure stock picker and looks for a good company will be quite diversified by industry. In this case, their tracking error may be quite low and lead us to (wrongly) assume that they aren’t taking much active risk.