Case Name :      Portfolio Diversification Enigma

Authors :           Varun Dawar

Source :             Ivey Publishing

Case ID :            W14504

Discipline :        Finance

Case Length :    03 pages

Solution Sample availability : YES

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

In early January 2013, a product manager with one of the leading insurance companies in Delhi, India, sat in his home office and pondered the strategy he had followed for his personal investment portfolio over the last three years. He was worried that talk of tapering off the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing Program, undertaken in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the Indian general elections in May 2014 might affect the value of his investments. In order to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns, he was considering diversifying his all-equity portfolio by adding gold. Before he went ahead, he needed to test the data by using past returns, standard deviations and correlations and then use the Sharpe Ratio to compare the risk-adjusted returns of the diversified portfolio (comprising gold and equity) vis-à-vis an all-equity portfolio.