Given a text T, and several options, according to the question posed in the text T to choose the most appropriate option from the options as the answer, please directly output the most appropriate option, do not need to output the explanation.

Emily Yuen is a senior analyst for a consulting firm that specializes in assessing equity strategies using backtesting and simulation techniques. She is working with an assistant, Cameron Ruckey, to develop multifactor portfolio strategies based on nine factors common to the growth style of investing. To do so, Yuen and Ruckey plan to construct nine separate factor portfolios and then use them to create factor-weighted allocation portfolios.Yuen tasks Ruckey with specifying the investment universe and determining the availability of appropriate reporting data in vendor databases. Ruckey selects a vendor database that does not provide point-in-time data, so he adjusts the database to include point-in-time constituent stocks and a reporting lag of four months.Next, Yuen and Ruckey run initial backtests on the nine factor portfolios, calculating performance statistics and key metrics for each. For backtesting purposes, the portfolios are rebalanced monthly over a 30-year time horizon using a rolling-window procedure.Yuen and Ruckey consider a variety of metrics to assess the results of the factor portfolio backtests. Yuen asks Ruckey what can be concluded from the data for three of the factor strategies in Exhibit 1:
| Exhibit 1Back test Metrics for Factor Strategies |
| Factor 1 | Factor 2 | Factor 3 |
| VaR(95%) | (3.9%) | (1.3%) | (8.4%) |
| Standard deviation ofreturns | 2.1% | 1.2% | 4.6% |
| Maximum drawdown | 27.2% | 8.3% | 59.7% |


Ruckey tells Yuen the following:Statement 1: We do not need to consider maximum drawdown, because standard deviation sufficiently characterizes risk.Statement 2: Factor 2 has the highest downside risk.From her professional experience Yuen knows that benchmark and risk parity factor portfolios, in which factors are equally weighted and equally risk weighted, respectively, are popular with institutional and high-net-worth clients. To gain a more complete picture of these investment strategies’ performance, Yuen and Ruckey design a Benchmark Portfolio (A) and a Risk Parity Portfolio (B), and then run two simulation methods to generate investment performance data based on the underlying factor portfolios, assuming 1,000 simulation trials for each approach:Approach 1: Historical simulationApproach 2: Monte Carlo simulation.Yuen and Ruckey discuss the differences between the two approaches and then design the simulations, making key decisions at various steps. During the process, Yuen expresses a number of concerns:Concern 1: Returns from six of the nine factors are correlated.Concern 2: The distribution of Factor 1 returns exhibits excess kurtosis and negative skewness.Concern 3: The number of simulations needed for Approach 1 is larger than the size of the historical dataset.For each approach, Yuen and Ruckey run 1,000 trials to obtain 1,000 returns for Portfolios A and B. To help understand the effect of the skewness and excess kurtosis observed in the Factor 1 returns on the performance of Portfolios A and B, Ruckey suggests simulating an additional 1,000 factor returns using a multivariate skewed Student’s t-distribution, then repeating the Approach 2 simulation.
Simulation Approach 1 (historical simulation) differs from Approach 2 (Monte Carlo simulation) in that:
Option A:it is deterministic.
Option B:a functional form of the statistical distribution for each decision variable needs to be specified.
Option C:it assumes that sampling the returns from the actual data provides sufficient guidance about future asset returns.

Answer: C