Author: Kip Lytel, CFA
Research Associate: Loveth Abu
The U.S. equity market has just completed a rare stretch: three consecutive years of double-digit returns. Periods like this are celebrated — and rightly so, but history suggests they should also prompt reflection. Extended runs of strong performance often lead investors to over-concentrate on what has worked best, precisely when diversification becomes most valuable. Exposure naturally drifts toward recent winners, portfolio balance erodes slowly, and return expectations become anchored to conditions that may no longer persist.
Strong markets reward patience and reinforce confidence in long-term investing. They also have a quieter effect on portfolios: risk begins to feel lower than it actually is, and diversification — while still being discussed becomes easier to deprioritize. In those environments, portfolios that rely heavily on a single growth engine can begin to behave in unexpected ways. In those environments, portfolios built on a single dominant source of return can become less resilient to change.
This is not a call to abandon equities. It is simply a reminder that markets evolve. Leadership rotates, volatility returns, and the conditions that support one period of strong performance rarely remain constant. After periods of unusually strong equity performance, forward returns have historically become more uneven, drawdowns more frequent, and correlations less predictable.
History offers useful perspective. Similar stretches of exceptional equity performance have occurred before — notably in the late 1990s, the mid-2000s, and the post-crisis expansion of the 2010s. Each period was accompanied by strong narratives explaining why “this time was different.” Each was also followed by an environment where returns became more uneven, volatility increased, and diversification reasserted its value.
Compounding this challenge is an unusually high level of global uncertainty. These forces increasingly overlap. Policy decisions affect markets more quickly. Geopolitical developments influence inflation and supply chains. Currency movements shape global returns even when asset prices appear stable. Ongoing conflicts, expanding geopolitical interventions, and shifting alliances are reshaping economic relationships in real time. Developments in regions such as Venezuela continue to influence energy and commodity markets, while evolving U.S. policies have placed visible strain on long-standing relationships with European and Middle Eastern partners. At the same time, persistent U.S. fiscal imbalances and relative interest-rate dynamics have pressured the U.S. dollar, adding another layer of complexity for globally allocated portfolios. In this environment, traditional assumptions about stability, correlation, and leadership are increasingly unreliable.
Portfolio construction must therefore account not only for market risk, but for geopolitical, currency, tariff and policy regime risk as well. For investors, this means that market risk can no longer be evaluated in isolation from policy, currency, and geopolitical considerations.
That is why multi-asset strategy is a practical, real-world approach — and the portfolio standard for navigating a volatile world. A defining advantage of a multi-asset strategy is its ability to combine assets and strategies that exhibit low correlation to one another over full market cycles. Correlation, not volatility, is the true enemy of diversification. When multiple assets decline together, traditional portfolio construction fails. Multi-asset design explicitly seeks to avoid that outcome by blending return streams that respond differently to economic growth, inflation, interest-rate policy, volatility, and geopolitical stress.
The Strategic Purpose of Multi-Asset Investing
A multi-asset strategy is designed to solve one problem:
How to compound capital consistently while controlling drawdowns across market regimes. In practice, this means building portfolios that are not dependent on getting one big call right — whether on markets, interest rates, or the economy — but are designed to work across a range of outcomes.
Markets do not reward prediction over long periods. They reward adaptability, balance, and discipline. Even well-researched views can be overwhelmed by unexpected events, policy shifts, or changes in market structure. Over time, portfolios that rely on flexibility rather than forecasts tend to hold up better when conditions change. A portfolio that can generate returns from multiple independent sources is structurally better positioned than one dependent on a single outcome. When one return driver slows or experiences stress, others can continue to contribute, helping smooth results and reduce the impact of any single disappointment.
Why Drawdowns Matter More Than Returns
Returns attract attention, but drawdowns shape outcomes. How a portfolio behaves during difficult periods often matters more than how it performs during strong ones.
Large losses are mathematically and behaviorally destructive:
- A 20% loss requires a 25% gain to recover.
- A 40% loss requires a 67% gain to recover.
- A 50% loss requires a 100% gain to break even.
The deeper the loss, the harder the climb back — and the longer capital spends simply recovering rather than compounding.
Just as important, investors rarely stay invested through losses of that magnitude. Stress increases, confidence erodes, and decision-making becomes reactive rather than strategic. At that point, even sound long-term strategies can be abandoned at precisely the wrong time. Strategy abandonment, not poor asset selection, is the most common cause of long-term underperformance. Portfolios that are easier to stay invested in often outperform over full cycles — not because they eliminate risk, but because they manage it more effectively.
Multi-asset portfolios help address this challenge by spreading volatility across multiple return sources rather than concentrating it in one place.
Diversification Means Return Drivers, Not Asset Labels
Diversification is often misunderstood. Owning many investments does not automatically reduce risk if those investments respond the same way to the same conditions. True diversification is not about owning many holdings. It is about owning strategies that respond differently to:
- Economic growth
- Inflation
- Interest rates
- Volatility
- Credit conditions
- Policy changes
- Corporate activity
- Geopolitical risks
When these drivers are thoughtfully combined, portfolio performance becomes less dependent on any single economic narrative. Some strategies may struggle at times, but others are positioned to perform, helping smooth overall results. When these drivers are combined, portfolio behavior improves even if individual components remain volatile. The result is not a portfolio designed to avoid uncertainty, but one built to function through it.
Core Portfolio Structure
A disciplined multi-asset portfolio is typically built in three layers, each layer plays a distinct role, and together they are designed to balance growth, risk management, and resilience across changing market conditions.
1. Core Growth Allocation
Purpose: Long-term appreciation.
This layer serves as the primary engine of long-term portfolio growth and is anchored in equity ownership.
- Global equity exposure
Equities represent ownership in productive businesses and remain the most reliable long-term source of real return. A global approach reduces dependence on any single country or economy and allows portfolios to benefit from innovation, productivity, and growth wherever it occurs.
- Factor and style diversification
Diversification across styles and factors — such as growth, value, quality, and momentum — helps reduce reliance on a narrow market leadership group. Periods when large-cap growth dominates are often followed by environments where value, international, or smaller-cap stocks perform better.
Historically, equities have delivered 8–10% annualized returns, but with frequent and deep drawdowns. Drawdowns of 20–40% are not unusual, and periods of strong performance are often followed by extended stretches of volatility or consolidation. In a multi-asset framework, equities are treated as a powerful contributor — not the sole source — of portfolio success.
2. Absolute Return “Moat” – Liquid Alternative Assets
Purpose: Stability and drawdown control.
This layer is designed to help manage risk during periods when traditional markets are stressed. Rather than relying on market direction, these strategies aim to generate returns through structure, flexibility, and selective risk exposure. Liquid alternative strategies play a critical role in this framework. Long-short equity, global macro, trend-following, event-driven, and option-based income strategies are not dependent on markets rising to generate returns. Their performance is driven by dispersion, volatility, relative value, and structural inefficiencies rather than simple market direction. As a result, they have historically shown low — and at times negative — correlation to traditional equity and bond markets during periods of stress.
This independence is precisely what improves portfolio behavior. Returns arrive from different sources, at different times, and for different reasons. While no single strategy is consistently dominant, their combination produces a portfolio that is materially more stable, more resilient, and better positioned to compound across market regimes.
Examples include:
- Long-short equity
These strategies seek to benefit from both strong and weak companies, reducing reliance on broad market gains and helping dampen equity drawdowns. - Global macro
Macro strategies can adjust exposures across currencies, rates, commodities, and equities, often responding quickly to policy changes, inflation shifts, or geopolitical developments. - Event-driven
These focus on corporate actions such as mergers, restructurings, or spin-offs, where outcomes are driven more by deal mechanics than market direction. - Option-income and put-write strategies
These approaches generate income by collecting option premiums, which can help cushion downside during volatile or sideways markets. - Convertible bond strategies
Convertibles offer a blend of equity participation and bond-like downside protection, helping smooth returns across market environments.
These approaches seek to generate returns with lower dependence on market direction and historically have produced 6–9% long-term returns with lower volatility than equities. Their role is not to replace growth assets, but to provide structural balance and reduce the impact of equity-driven drawdowns.
3. Tertiary Uncorrelated Assets
Purpose: Regime diversification.
These assets are included to help portfolios navigate environments that challenge traditional stock and bond allocations.
- Commodities
Commodities can benefit from supply constraints, rising input costs, and inflationary pressures that often weigh on financial assets. - Precious metals. This have historically acted as stores of value during periods of currency uncertainty or geopolitical stress.
- Industrial metals such as copper (infrastructure, electrification, AI demand). Copper demand is closely tied to infrastructure spending, electrification, renewable energy, and data-center expansion.
- REITs and real assets. This can provide income and inflation sensitivity, particularly when cash flows adjust with price levels.
These exposures often perform best when traditional portfolios struggle. Their value lies in how they behave during stress, not in short-term return comparisons.
Correlation Control Is Portfolio Control
Diversification works only when assets respond differently to the same conditions. Diversification fails when correlations rise. Multi-asset strategies focus not just on what is owned, but on how those components interact over full market cycles. Multi-asset strategies explicitly seek assets and strategies that maintain low correlation across full cycles.
Historically:
- Equity vs. commodities: near-zero correlation over long periods
- Equity vs. macro/trend strategies: often negative in crises
- Option-income strategies: materially lower volatility than equities
Managing correlation at the portfolio level is what allows outcomes to remain more stable through periods of market stress. This is how portfolio paths become smoother.
The Compounding Advantage
Volatility is more than a short-term discomfort — it directly affects long-term results.
- 10% return with 18% volatility
- 8% return with 9% volatility
While the first portfolio appears more attractive on the surface, the second often compounds more effectively due to fewer severe drawdowns and faster recoveries
Institutions have known this for decades. The focus is not on maximizing returns in any single year, but on protecting the ability to compound across many years. That is why pensions, endowments, and sovereign funds rely on multi-asset construction.
Behavioral Discipline Is Built Into the Design
Portfolio design plays a significant role in how investors experience market volatility. When portfolios are dominated by a single return source, every market decline feels personal, binary, and emotionally disruptive. In contrast, multi-asset portfolios distribute both opportunity and disappointment across multiple strategies, reducing the psychological pressure to react at precisely the wrong time.
By smoothing the path of returns, multi-asset construction helps investors remain engaged, rational, and aligned with long-term objectives. Discipline is not enforced through willpower alone — it is supported by structure. In that sense, behavioral consistency is not merely an investor trait; it is an intentional outcome of thoughtful portfolio design.
Multi-asset portfolios:
- Reduce emotional decision-making
- Improve investor consistency
- Lower the probability of catastrophic timing errors
When portfolios are structured to weather difficult periods, investors are more likely to remain invested and aligned with long-term objectives. Discipline, in this sense, is not enforced — it is built into the portfolio itself.
Montecito Capital Management: A Pioneer in Multi-Asset Investing
For more than 20 years, Montecito Capital Management has been an early advocate and practitioner of multi-asset portfolio construction for private investors. The firm’s approach developed not as a response to market trends, but from firsthand experience navigating multiple market cycles and periods of stress.
Long before diversified liquid alternatives became mainstream, Montecito recognized that traditional stock-and-bond portfolios were structurally insufficient for modern markets. As markets became more complex and correlations less stable, the limitations of relying on a narrow set of return drivers became increasingly clear. The firm incorporated absolute-return strategies, liquid alternatives, and uncorrelated assets well ahead of industry norms. These decisions were guided by portfolio behavior across different environments, not by short-term performance comparisons.
Montecito Capital’s guiding principles have remained consistent:
- Multiple independent return drivers
Portfolios are designed to draw returns from different sources, reducing reliance on any single market outcome or economic assumption. - Structural risk management over market timing
Rather than attempting to anticipate short-term market moves, Montecito emphasizes portfolio construction that is resilient by design. - Drawdown control as a compounding requirement
Managing downside risk is viewed as essential to long-term capital growth, not as a defensive afterthought. - Portfolio design that protects investor behavior
Portfolios are built with the understanding that investor experience during difficult markets often determines long-term success.
Rather than pursuing short-term performance leadership, Montecito has focused on full-cycle durability — an approach increasingly aligned with institutional portfolio standards. The objective is not to outperform in every market environment, but to remain both robust and effective across many of them.
Final Perspective
After three consecutive years of strong U.S. equity returns, investors face a familiar choice: lean further into what has worked or rebalance toward resilience. Strong performance often makes the former feel comfortable, even when underlying risks are quietly increasing. History favors the latter. Experience suggests the latter tends to serve investors better over full market cycles.
Multi-asset strategy is not about reducing opportunity. It is about protecting it. By managing risk thoughtfully and maintaining diversification across return drivers, portfolios are better positioned to stay invested and participate in long-term growth. In a world defined by volatility, policy shifts, and rapid regime changes, the portfolio standard is no longer single-asset thinking — it is intentional, multi-asset design.