Large Drawdowns and Long-Term Asset Management

Long-term investors are often hesitant to invest in assets or strategies prone to significant drawdowns, primarily due to the challenge of predicting these drawdowns. This study presents a multivariate Markov-switching model for small- and large-cap returns in the U.S. equity markets, demonstrating that three distinct regimes are necessary to capture the negative trends in expected returns during financial crises. Our findings indicate that this framework enhances the prediction of conditional drawdowns compared to standard alternative models of financial returns. Furthermore, out-of-sample analysis shows that investment strategies based on these predictions outperform those relying on models with one or two regimes.