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Rebuilding equity diversification: Four levers, one risk budget

by Salman Ahmed, Matthew Quaife, Stefan Rusev.

Executive summary

  • Changes in the prevailing macro regime have created fresh challenges and opportunities.
  • Investors must now consider geoeconomic fragmentation, fiscal sustainability risks, the dominance of the AI theme, and the high concentration of market-cap weighted indices when making equity allocation decisions.
  • We believe there are four key levers that could help investors to meet these challenges:
    1. Regional breadth reduces reliance on US mega-cap leadership and can improve the balance of equity return drivers.
    2. Factor exposure offers a transparent route “off market cap”, diversifying return drivers across styles and risk premia, while allowing to keep sector exposures within tight ranges.
    3. Active management complements regional and factor tilts by capturing tactical opportunities across stocks, sectors and regions as leadership rotates, alongside security selection.
    4. Currency hedging is no longer a background decision, it can materially shape realised outcomes for non-USD investors. 
  • Implementation discipline is essential: our framework links portfolio design to macro themes while managing tracking error, costs and governance constraints.
  • In addition, we believe investors need to think more broadly about how to make their portfolios resilient in this environment, including adding less correlated exposures such as absolute return and gold, and active duration management for fixed income allocations. 

Download the full paper

 

  •   19 March 2026
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