The Many Challenges of Thematic Investing

Thematic investing最近突出了相当大的突出，作为雇用该战略的一些新的交易所交易资金（ETF）。

But money managers and analysts have mixed views about the thematic investing concept, which attempts to design funds that profit from trends. If you discover a lasting trend early in its life cycle, they say, and choose securities that actually benefit from it, thematic investing can work well. These are difficult hurdles, however. “There are some successful approaches, but I start off skeptical,” says Russel Kinnel, director of manager research at Morningstar in Chicago.

Thematic funds account for 30 percent of the 187 new ETFs introduced so far this year, focusing on trends as diverse as obesity, Millennials’ consumption, aging and health and fitness.

The first challenge with thematic funds is knowing whether you have found a long-term trend or a very short-lived fad. “You have to make sure your trends have legs,” says Karim Ahamed, senior investment adviser for wealth management firm HPM Partners in Chicago.

Ahamed notes that three to four years ago investment managers came out with funds to protect against rising interest rates, thinking that stronger economic growth and a reversal of the Federal Reserve’s massive quantitative-easing program would push rates higher for a long time. Of course rates have hardly budged. Other funds were introduced to take advantage of China’s booming economic growth, which proceeded to slow markedly.

Themes can be rendered moot by a range of factors, including changes in government policy andadvances in technology. Some themes amount to a distillation of what investment bankers are selling, Kinnel says: A bank sponsoring an initial public offering might tout the company as fitting into a broader theme.

即使你确实识别了持久的主题，如果你不够早就来到桌子，你可能不会从中赚几钱。“问题是你可能会购买已经定价的东西，”凯纳说。“你可以提前用云计算赚钱，但今天的价格是。”他引用了美国老龄化和页岩革命作为其他例子。“分析师不是没有人口统计学的白痴，”他说。

然后有一个关于给定趋势的合适证券的问题。“这绝对是一个挑战，”洗诺斯说。“如果您在互联网上投资，您可以知道谷歌在雅虎和亚马逊在其他零售商中选择谷歌吗？有些人做过，但更常见的是，距离这条路只有明显。“

Nonetheless, if you hit it right, the rewards can be plentiful. While many investors have embraced passive strategies, there is a movement among institutional investors to step away from chasing indexes and from plain vanilla active investing, Ahamed says. “The usual benchmark investing at best keeps up with an index,” he says. “There’s not a tremendous opportunity for upside. Thematic investing offers more ways to generate returns.”

他和他的同事正在调查water scarcity作为一个主题，尽管它并不容易找到适当的投资车辆。“我们看着海水淡化，发现美国没有许多商业上可获得的应用。”，“Ahamed说。

Advisors Capital Management of Ridgewood, New Jersey, frequently uses thematic investing in its stock portfolios. One theme it likes is the effects of demographics on housing. “We should have 1.5 million households formed per year, well above the new-construction rate of about 1.2 million,” says Charles Lieberman, the firm’s chief investment officer.

He and his colleagues also see low energy prices as a durable theme. Accordingly, they sought out a company that sells to the housing sector and uses plenty of energy to make its products. They chose USG, which uses natural gas in manufacturing wallboard. The stock has gained 6.4 percent so far this year. “We look for as many themes as make sense and give us a diversified base,” Lieberman says. “So if we’re right on average, it should work out well.” The firm has 45 to 50 positions in a portfolio, and a single theme would generally account for two or three of them.

The total number of thematic positions depends on how many viable trends Advisors Capital uncovers. “If we had 40 themes and that filled up a portfolio, I’d have no problem as long as it was properly diversified,” Lieberman says.

But can thematic investments provide diversification? “That depends on how [the funds] are run and where they invest,” Kinnel says. “The funds may have parallels with more typical growth funds. If the themes are more in the alternative-investment space, then the funds might have more diversification value.”