Resolve Riffs Investment Podcast · ReSolve Asset Management

Return Stack Anything: Portable Alpha with RSSB

·37 min·2 clips

RSSB gives one dollar of global stocks and one dollar of U.S. Treasury exposure for each dollar invested.

1. Resolve Riffs Investment Podcast episode “Return Stack Anything: Portable Alpha with RSSB” focuses on the RSSB ETF and the portable alpha framework. 2. Rodrigo Gordillo is president of Resolve Asset Management Global, and Corey Hofstein is CIO of Newfound Research, so both are directly tied to the Returnstack suite. 3. The episode asks how investors can keep core stock-and-bond exposure while adding alternatives on top. 4. Corey says Portable Alpha came from institutional bond management in the 1980s, with PIMCO often credited as an originator. 5. He uses the U.S. Aggregate Bond Index to show why Treasury-heavy benchmarks are hard to beat through security selection alone. 6. Treasury futures let a manager buy Treasury exposure while leaving cash available for another return source. 7. Corey uses a mortgage analogy to compare futures leverage with putting a down payment on a house. 8. He says the financing cost embedded in Treasury futures has historically tracked three-month T-bills more closely than mortgage borrowing costs. 9. PIMCO’s bond-plus approach used that spare cash to buy short-term instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and other cash-like assets. 10. Corey says PIMCO later applied the same structure to U.S. equities with S&P 500 futures and short-term bond investments. 11. He argues this separated the source of alpha from the benchmark beta and created what became known as portable alpha. 12. Corey contrasts that with the funding problem of alternatives, where investors often have to sell stocks and bonds to make room. 13. He says the traditional 60/40 to 50/30/20 shift creates both a return hurdle and a behavioral hurdle for alternatives. 14. The episode cites SPIVA and says only 10% of large-cap managers have beaten their benchmark after costs over the last 15 years. 15. Corey compares that with a stack that adds 275 basis points from broad hedge fund exposure without manager selection skill. 16. He describes alternatives as Lego-like building blocks that can be mixed into combinations such as gold, trend following, macro, or equity long-short. 17. RSSB is presented as a vehicle that gives one dollar of global equity exposure and one dollar of U.S. Treasury exposure for each dollar invested. 18. Corey says RSSB uses about 90 cents in passive equity, 10 cents in T-bills, equity futures, and a ladder of two-, five-, ten-year, and long-bond Treasury futures. 19. The tone is instructional and presentation-driven, with technical explanations and live Q&A from Rodrigo. 20. Listeners who want portfolio-construction tools and ETF mechanics will get the most value, while listeners seeking narrative storytelling may skip it.

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