Long-term investors face a common problem-how to maintain the purchasing power of their assets over time and achieve a level of real returns consistent with their investment objectives. While inflation-linked bonds and derivatives have been developed to hedge the effects of inflation, their limited supply and liquidity lead many investors to continue to rely on the indirect hedging properties of traditional asset classes. In this paper, we assess these properties over different time horizons, in the context of a diversified portfolio. Using a vector error correction model, we find that effective short-run hedges, such as commodities, may not work over longer horizons and that tactical asset allocation could enhance investment returns following inflation surprises.

Authoritative chapters written by executives at Goldman Sachs, PIMCO, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and others Covers key assets that protect against inflation--real estate, commodities, precious metals, inflation-linked bonds, CPI futures, and timber

This paper examines inflation and the role of inflation-hedging assets in an institutional portfolio. Even in the current environment of low realized inflation, inflation risk remains, in the form of inflation surprises, which have historically been damaging for equity and bond portfolios. Traditional inflation-hedging assets include commodities, natural resources equities, and TIPS, among others. Meketa Investment Group recommends that investors evaluate inflation risk by focusing on inflation surprises rather than on realized inflation. Furthermore, when allocating to inflation-hedging assets, institutional investors should approach this problem from a total portfolio perspective, which includes determining individual inflation-hedging objectives and considering the return and risk tradeoffs that inflation-hedging assets introduce to a portfolio.

Inflation is an inevitable part of the current economic and financial system. While the rates of inflation might be different among countries, depending on the management of the economy, one thing common about inflation in various countries is its persistency. The persistency of inflation can only be due to the continuous increase in the money supply at a rate higher than the production of goods and services, which is a common feature of the fiat monetary system that the world economies have adopted today. Faced with continuous inflation, individuals and businesses are forced to hedge against inflation by investing in various assets, rather than keeping their wealth in the form of cash. The current study adopts OLS analysis and cointegration techniques to test gold, real estate and stocks as a hedge against inflation, using quarterly data of six countries for the period from 1991 to 2008. The assets are selected as proxies of both real and financial assets while countries are selected with the objective of presenting countries with different rates of financial and economic development in order to analyze and compare the performance of each asset as a hedge against inflation. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that gold is a good hedge against inflation in most of the cases as compared to real estate and stocks. It performs well as an inflation hedge in both developed and developing economies, but in long run only. Real estate, on the other hand, presents a good inflation hedge in developing countries and mostly in the long run, while stocks as a hedge against inflation performed well in developed countries and mostly in the short run only.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, Texas A&M University (Texas A&M University-Commerce), language: English, abstract: This thesis examines optimized portfolios of three investor types during four different time intervals ranging from 1998 to 2013 to determine if the inclusion of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) has benefits for institutional investors such as pension plans, university endowments, foundations and sovereign wealth funds. The three investor types used in this study differ in their risk tolerance, with the more risk-averse investor type choosing not to include certain asset classes in his investment portfolio. The efficient frontier algorithm, developed by Prof. Harry Markowitz, is used to determine whether the inclusion of TIPS improves the risk/return profile of the portfolio. Sharpe ratio, developed by Prof. William Sharpe, is used to measure a portfolio’s risk adjusted performance. The study found that the benefits of the inclusion of TIPS in a portfolio vary by time period and investor type. While all investors were able to improve their risk return profile, the more risk-averse investor type benefits to a larger degree from the inclusion of TIPS. Furthermore, a significant increase in the financial efficiency was only observed in the 1998 to 2002 period. Therefore, the researcher concludes that the TIPS market is quite dynamic and investors need to take into account forward-looking information to profit from the inclusion of TIPS in investment portfolios.

Investors are always searching for assets which are negatively correlated with common portfolios of stocks and bonds and which provide reasonable average returns. One broad group of such assets might be termed real assets--assets which are at least partially hedged against inflation, in that they tend to increase in price in response to an inflation shock. This paper examines the properties of a variety of asset classes which might broadly be thought of as "real" assets. It looks at how closely correlated these classes are with inflation as well as how effectively they help insure major financial asset classes against adverse shocks. It also examines how inflation hedges might be combined in a portfolio.

We examine the effectiveness of private- and public-equity farmland and timberland assets in hedging actual, expected, and unexpected inflation by using the capital asset pricing model under inflation and rolling regressions. Private-equity farmland can hedge all inflation types with a 15-year investment horizon, whereas private- and public-equity timberland can hedge expected and unexpected inflation with a 15- and 30-year investment horizon. Public-equity farmland is found to be an ineffective inflation hedge in the whole sample period (2013Q1-2021Q4). There is also evidence that the financial crisis of 2008 is the cutoff period after which the public-equity farmland and timberland assets become more effective inflation hedges and the ability gets stronger as the investment horizon goes beyond 10 years. Results suggest that the inflation hedging effectiveness depends on the investment horizon and the state of the economy, and differs across farmland and timberland assets.