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Asset Allocation Research Team (AART)
AART conducts fundamental and quantitative research to develop asset-allocation recommendations for Fidelity's portfolio managers and investment teams. AART generates insights on macroeconomic, policy, and financial-market trends and their implications for strategic and active asset allocation.
Multi-Horizon
Framework
AART believes that economic fundamentals provide the backdrop for asset markets, influencing corporate earnings, interest rates, inflation, and many other factors that affect the returns of stocks, bonds, and other asset classes. Our framework begins with the premise that long-term historical averages provide a reasonable baseline for portfolio allocations. However, over shorter time horizons—30 years or less—asset price fluctuations are driven by a confluence of various short-, intermediate-, and long-term factors that may cause performance to deviate significantly from long-term historical averages. Read More ...
Secular
(10- to 30-year time frame)
Over this long time horizon, asset performance is heavily influenced by economic trends that evolve over extended periods, like demographic changes and productivity growth.
Business Cycle
(1- to 10-year time frame)
Over the intermediate term, asset performance is often driven largely by factors tied to the state of the economy such as corporate earnings, credit growth, and inventories.
Tactical
(1- to 12-month time frame)
Over shorter time periods, prices can deviate from their longer-term trends, providing attractive entry and exit points. Geopolitics, consumer sentiment, and flows all play a role here.
Demographic changes and productivity growth are two of the key drivers of long-term economic trends. Our secular approach centers on a research-based, multifaceted process to develop 20-year capital market assumptions for our asset allocation strategies. This comprehensive global approach is underpinned by fundamental analysis, across all geographies, of the core drivers and the principal linkages between economic trends and how they affect the performance of various asset classes.
We begin developing our long-term asset return and volatility assumptions by establishing 20-year forecasts of each country’s real, gross domestic product growth. Next, we identify the connections between GDP growth and asset class performance and translate them into specific asset assumptions.
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For this reason, incorporating a framework that analyzes underlying factors and trends among the following three temporal segments can be an effective asset allocation approach: tactical (1 to 12 months), business cycle (1 to 10 years), and secular (10 to 30 years).
Our duration-based asset allocation framework provides a thorough understanding of asset characteristics across various time horizons, which we then use to derive conclusions about portfolio construction. Because our analysis disaggregates economic drivers across asset classes for short-, intermediate-, and long-term time horizons, portfolio managers can use our research to focus on the signals that are most relevant to the individual objectives and constraints of a particular investment strategy.
Source: Fidelity Investments (AART). For illustrative purposes only. Always consider fees and expenses when rebalancing a portfolio.
Market Insights
Podcast
Market Insights: Tariffs and Market Turbulence. A Month of Economic Ups and Downs
Dirk Hofschire, CFA, and Lars Schuster discuss ongoing market volatility, including U.S. tariff policies, a big market correction, nearly plunging to bear market territory, and much more in this episode recorded on May 5, 2025.
Listen to the Podcast
The Team
Regular contributors from Asset Allocation Research Team (AART) include:
Dirk Hofschire
Director of Asset Allocation Research
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Jacob Weinstein
Senior Vice President, Asset Allocation Research
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Cait Dourney
Head of Business-Cycle Asset Allocation Research
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