Diversifying beyond traditional assets: Candriam’s alternative investment platform is built on a broad range of strategies with complementary drivers, aiming to seek uncorrelated sources of performance and strengthen portfolio robustness across all market environments.
Financial markets are shaped by structural forces and constantly evolving dynamics, creating both opportunities and risks. Economic shifts, rate cycles and geopolitical tensions can all trigger abrupt changes in market regimes, clouding visibility and complicating investment decisions. In such phases, the challenge is not to predict every market move, but to build robust portfolios capable of both delivering positive, uncorrelated returns across environment types and of withstanding market downturns.
That is precisely the purpose of alternative investments: to complement an asset allocation by diversifying sources of performance. Alternative investments can enhance the risk-return profile of a traditional portfolio. They provide a source of diversification and can help maintain portfolio robustness, whatever the market environment. This conviction is supported by our internal research, which highlights their ability to improve portfolio resilience, particularly during the most demanding market phases.
At Candriam, our alternative investment platform is built on a multi-specialist approach. Our rigorous risk management and the quality of our investment processes have enabled us to offer robust alternative solutions since 1996. Our team consists of 34 experts implementing 10 investment strategies across the main asset classes. All are built around one common objective: seeking to generate performance uncorrelated with traditional asset classes, while controlling risk and thereby adding value to our clients’ portfolios.
Not all alternative strategies behave in the same way. Each plays a specific role within a portfolio depending on the market environment.
– Market neutral strategies aim to deliver stable, uncorrelated returns, with minimal directional market exposure.
– Directional long/short strategies seek to generate alpha by taking selective long and short positions. Their ability to benefit from both upward and downward trends can help provide protection during periods of market stress.
– Upside alpha strategies are designed to capture asset upside while minimising downside risk, thereby offering risk-adjusted returns superior to those of a passive long-only exposure.
– Quantitative multi-strategy solutions combine these different types of strategies within a dynamic allocation framework. By diversifying sources of alpha and adjusting strategy weights according to market conditions, they seek to build more resilient portfolios capable of extracting maximum value from each environment.
Our investment philosophy remains the same across ‘labels’: diversify intelligently. This means analysing risk factors closely, monitoring correlations and building portfolios in which every position has a clear purpose. It also requires disciplined management of constraints such as liquidity, concentration, and risk budgets, so that alternative investments can fully play their role as stabilisers within portfolios.
We are proud to offer our clients a wide range of liquid strategies, enabling them to combine them and adjust their exposure according to their needs.
Investor interest in alternative strategies often intensifies when uncertainty rises and markets become more volatile. When used as part of an overall asset allocation, some alternative strategies with low correlation to traditional assets may help reduce volatility and maximum drawdown during periods of risk aversion. Others may benefit from valuation inefficiencies or capture market trends.
Whether the objective is to reduce sensitivity to equity markets, broaden sources of return or seek to deliver positive performance during extreme market moves, there are alternative strategies available for the specific needs of each portfolio.
“ Our conviction is clear: no single strategy can navigate all market environments optimally. ”
All investments involve risks, including the risk of loss of capital. This is not the only risk, and further details on the risks associated with investing in alternative strategies are available in the regulatory documents of the relevant strategies.
Disclaimer
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