Creating a Time Lagged Offset Instrument

The creation of time lagged instruments is vital when wanting to compare a Life fund vs. its underlying Unit Trust for example.

With our custom time lagging feature, the user can stipulate the number of day's lagging is required for a fund, which is then priced accordingly thereafter. This enables like-for-like comparisons of movement and performance.

To show you how this works, I am going to use the Skandia Fidelity Special Situations (UK Insurance fund) and the Fidelity Special Situations (UK Unit Trust fund).

By drawing a 3 month chart you can see that they are effectively the same fund, however there is a "lag" of 1 day due to the Insurance fund having to wait for the underlying Unit Trust to price.

 

As you can see if you happen to catch the dates at the end of a good performance cycle, the difference without time lagging can be huge.

To apply a lag to the Fidelity Unit Trust Fund, simply add the fund to your active list and click on "create offset" under the Custom Instruments section.

 

A pop-up box will ask you to confirm if you would like to create an offset instrument of all selected instruments in your active list (this feature only works on funds, sectors and indices).

Clicking on "OK" will open the time lagged instrument setup page, whilst "Cancel" will abort the operation.

 

The offset instrument page is extremely simple to use. Just follow the 3 easy steps and click the save icon.

Note: If there is more units associated to a fund you will get a [+] appear by the fund name that allows you to expand the funds and chose which unit you want to lag as it may not necessarily be the selected unit. We have included latest price for this reason as it may assist the user with which unit they hold.

 

Once the instrument is saved, your lagged unit will be available to add to the active list via the custom instrument drop-down and the instruments will all end with "+ 1 day" (to represent "1 day lagged"). The number will change dependant on the number of business days that you have lagged by.

 

Now if you compare the lagged version of Fidelity Unit Trust with the Skandia Insurance fund, the results are much more realistic.