We examine realized P&L of a synthetic 5-year sovereign bond portfolio across Emerging and Frontier markets: Brazil (BRL), South Africa (ZAR), Turkey (TRY), Nigeria (NGN), and Pakistan (PKR).
The primary objective is to determine if strategy profitability survives real-world execution and structural currency devaluations. Furthermore, it evaluates which risk management frameworks offer superior capital preservation during idiosyncratic EM shocks.
- Portfolio Composition: Synthetic 5-year sovereign bonds across BRL, ZAR, TRY, NGN, and PKR.
- Funding Leg: Positions are funded at the risk-free British Pound (GBP) rate utilizing SONIA (Sterling Overnight Index Average).
- Execution: Weekly-traded rebalancing schedule to capture yield differentials.
To test resilience against market shocks, two distinct position-sizing and risk mitigation frameworks were backtested against a baseline carry strategy:
- Inverse-Volatility Sizing: Allocating capital inversely proportional to trailing statistical variance.
- Deterministic Stop-Loss: A mechanical framework utilizing a hard 10% drawdown limit coupled with a 24-week mandatory cooldown period.
Backtesting across periods of structural currency devaluation reveals that deterministic constraints offer significantly superior capital preservation compared to standard volatility metrics.
- The Failure of Inverse-Volatility: This framework failed by incorrectly equating variance with risk. During the Turkish Lira's (TRY) steady collapse, the structural devaluation destroyed portfolio capital in a linear, low-variance manner, entirely failing to trigger statistical volatility alarms.
- The Success of Mechanical Stops: The Stop-Loss strategy successfully decoupled the portfolio from the crash. By enforcing a strict 10% drawdown limit and a subsequent 24-week cooldown, the deterministic framework systematically bypassed the most destructive phases of the Lira's collapse.