Research Affiliates handles $150 billion for about 24 investment firms, including most of the equities and hybrid investments for PIMCO. I guess their most notably active fund might be PIMCO All Asset All Authority fund (PAUIX) and their RAFI-branded Fundamental Indexes are widely used. It's a quant shop with a pretty good reputation.
They've recently launched an extraordinarily rich
asset-allocation website. It targets projected 10-year returns and volatility for a wide variety of assets (from Brazilian currency to US large core equity). It starts with a simple set of projections, which struck as a nice but no big thing. Then I discovered that everything is clickable: the dot for an asset class opens a window on the confidence intervals for the return projects, the portfolio tab lets you set a series of MVO portfolios then click the dot to see its projected performance, then click again to see the recommended portfolio components, then click again to test your own asset allocation against all of theirs.
There are two big limitations to site. First, you have to believe in the Schiller CAPE P/E upon which the projections are all based. Second, you have to care about how things might do over a decade rather than being transfixed by the events of the past 11 days or 11 months or whatever.
In any case, I liked playing there.
David
