What Is the 130-30 Strategy?
Let me explain the 130-30 strategy directly to you—it's a long/short equity approach that institutional investors use. When you see the 130-30 label, it means allocating 130% of your starting capital to long positions, and you achieve this by shorting stocks worth 30% of that capital.
You employ this in a fund to boost capital efficiency. It leverages finances by shorting underperforming stocks, then using the cash from those shorts to buy shares expected to deliver high returns. Often, you'll mimic an index like the S&P 500 when picking stocks for this.
Key Takeaways
- This strategy shorts stocks and reinvests the cash into buying and holding the best-ranked stocks for a set period.
- It works well to limit drawdowns in investing.
- These strategies don't usually match major averages in total returns but offer better risk-adjusted returns.
Understanding the 130-30 Strategy
To implement a 130-30 strategy, you as an investment manager would rank stocks in something like the S&P 500 from best to worst based on expected returns, using past performance as a signal. You'll draw from various data sources and rules to rank them—typically by criteria like total returns, risk-adjusted performance, or relative strength over a look-back period of six months or a year. Then, you rank the stocks from best to worst.
From the top-ranked stocks, you'd invest 100% of the portfolio's value and short the bottom-ranked ones up to 30% of the value. The cash from those shorts gets reinvested into the top stocks, giving you greater exposure to them.
130-30 Strategy and Shorting Stocks
Short sales are a big part of the 130-30 strategy. When you short a stock, you're borrowing securities from someone, usually a broker, and paying an interest rate as a fee. This creates a negative position in your account. You then sell those securities on the open market at the current price and pocket the cash. You wait for the price to drop, buy them back cheaper, and return them to the broker. It's the reverse of buying first and selling later, but it still lets you profit.
Short selling is riskier than long positions, so in a 130-30 setup, you'll emphasize longs over shorts. Shorting exposes you to unlimited risk with capped rewards—for instance, if you short a stock at $30, your max gain is $30 minus fees, but losses can be infinite if the price rises forever.
Hedge funds and mutual fund companies now offer vehicles like private equity funds, mutual funds, or ETFs that follow 130-30 variations. Generally, these have lower volatility than benchmark indexes but often don't achieve higher total returns.
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