What is Portfolio Rebalancing?

Portfolio rebalancing is a strategy that has been used by investors for decades. Implementing rebalancing as a strategy for a portfolio means the investor must first determine how much of their portfolio they want to allocate to each asset. In the case of cryptocurrencies, each asset would be a coin or token. These allocations are simply the percent of each crypto asset that should be represented in the total value of the combined portfolio. When it is time to rebalance the portfolio, the coins are traded such that the value held in each asset is once again equal to the percentages that were originally specified.

Let’s look at an example. Say you have a portfolio where you have 4 different cryptocurrencies: BTC, ETH, LTC, and XMR. You have determined that you would like each of these four cryptocurrencies to have an equal 25% stake in your portfolio. This means, at the end of a rebalance, your portfolio would consist of 25% in each of these 4 assets. Since coins don’t generally cost the same per coin, the value should be calculated in fiat or a base currency, so the different coins won’t be equal in quantity, but in value. So, if you had $100 total between these four assets, you would have $25 in each after a rebalance took place.

Advantages of Rebalancing

With the trend of crypto investors “hodling” investments, rebalancing provides an opportunity to potentially boost these held earnings by taking advantage of rapid fluctuations in price. When a coin experiences strong gains, the rebalance will distribute those gains among the other assets. This means even if the value of the coin returns to the original price before the rise, rebalancing allows the portfolio to net a positive gain over this period.

In order to demonstrate the potential advantage over holding coins, we performed a detailed analysis with real market data over the last 1-year period. Based on our findings, rebalancing beats HODL by a median of 64%. After taxes, this represents 92% of all possible cryptocurrency portfolios.Without any work involved in managing the coins, performing trades, or changing allocations, rebalancing took holding to an entirely new level. You can see the rest of the analysis here:

A Comparison Of Rebalancing Strategies for Crypto Portfolios

You can see how well other portfolios would have performed over the last year by using our simple backtest tool.

Common Rebalancing Strategies

There are numerous rebalancing strategies, but we will only discuss two of the most common strategies.

Periodic

Simple illustration depicting how periodic rebalancing takes place at specific times. After 24 hours, the allocations are not equal, so a rebalance will make them equal once again.

The simplest of these strategies is periodic rebalancing, which uses a fixed amount of time between each rebalance. This amount of time is usually shorter for cryptocurrencies than for other asset classes, due to rapid price fluctuations. For example, it would be reasonable to select a portfolio rebalance time of 1 day. This would mean that at the same time every day, your portfolio would be rebalanced.

Dive into our recent studies on high frequency rebalancing…

Threshold

This demonstrates a threshold rebalance when a portfolio reaches a 20% deviation from their target allocations. Notice the green and the blue assets are 20% away from their target allocation of 25%. This difference between the target and current allocations triggers a rebalance.

Rebalancing based on allocation tolerance bands examines the drift of the allocations relative to their target, or desired, allocations. By evaluating this difference, the drift of each asset is tracked over time. So as the percent allocation of individual coins drift further from the desired percentages, a rebalance takes place when the difference between the current and target allocations crosses a threshold. For example, with a threshold that is +-20% on an asset with a 25% target allocation, if the asset represents 5% more or less of the entire portfolio than this target, the portfolio is rebalanced. Imagine the situation previously discussed where we had 4 different coins that each held 25% of the portfolio value. In this method, a rebalance would happen as soon as one of those assets consumes less than 20% or more than 30% of the portfolio value. However, this also means that if all of the coins in the portfolio are increasing or decreasing in value together, without changing their percent representation in the total portfolio, then no rebalance takes place.

Explore threshold rebalancing further…

Rebalancing in Shrimpy

In the Shrimpy application, we use both the periodic and threshold rebalancing strategies to help new investors get into cryptocurrency investing without having to worry about complex trading strategies. Predicting the daily movements of the crypto market is difficult, so rebalancing provides a way to eliminate the need for such predictions. This means you can define allocations for each of the currencies you would like to invest in as well as the frequency that this portfolio will be rebalanced. If you need some help on getting started with creating a portfolio, be sure to check out our previous post which details our tips for choosing strong investments. Try Shrimpy now!