Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s Global Investment Office (GIO) has launched the Equity Vulnerability Score, a proprietary tool that can help clients and the financial advisors who serve them measure and rank the susceptibility of US stocks to potential future drops in value. As a risk management tool, this can help provide important insights for investors—especially those who hold concentrated equity positions, which Morgan Stanley defines as five or fewer stocks making up more than 30% of the risk in a portfolio. Concentrated equity positions often occur naturally for company founders, those who receive equity compensation, and early investors. As these positions grow over time, they can unwittingly expose the investor to underperformance, higher volatility and material drawdowns—when a stock begins to decline from its peak and can drag the rest of the investor’s portfolio down with it. Looking historically, the GIO found that among the individual stocks contained in the Russell 1000 Index, a stock market index that represents the 1000 top companies by market capitalization in the United States:
- Individual stocks were more than twice as volatile as the index itself (37% v. 15%) since 2014
- The average stock’s maximum drawdown was twice as large as the index’s (approximately 50% vs. 25%)
- Most individual stocks tend to underperform the index on any forward-looking basis, with the median underperformance clocking in at -2.6% per year
- Most stocks that outperformed the index over five years went on to then underperform in the following five years1
- The Equity Vulnerability Score can help flag the likelihood that a stock may soon drop in value, and can also be used to complement Morgan Stanley’s existing Tactical Equity Framework, which helps identify short-term opportunities to seek overall stronger performance.