Risk premium or asset class?

Lets say I have a company which buys and sells bread (wholesale). This company is traded on stock exchange and we consider this company as a part of equity asset class. What does it exactly mean - equity asset class? It means, that I am owner of the future gains of company.

So lets take a better look on what is that company in reality doing. That company is in reality doing arbitrage strategy (or spread strategy) based on price difference between two parts of country (buys bread in one part of the contry in big quantity and sells it to the public in other part of the country in smaller quantities). What this company does is that it trades some underlaying comodity (corn in this example) - as an allegory. And this company is mostly sensible to price of corn.

Now lets say we have trading algorithm which trades gold. Algorithm is trying to exploit some market ineffeciency on gold market and lets call it "ABX Alpha Gold" as an example. Company which is mining gold would be sensitive mostly to same market risks as our "ABX Alpha Gold".

Algorithm and company are often interchangable components of same machine - our portfolio. What is important is how are companies/algorithms sensitive to change of some input parameter (price of some raw material, change in interest rates, S&P index drawdown etc. etc.). Input parameters are also sensitive to other input parameters (price of gold could be sensitive to change in CPI as an example).

For us - portfolio managers who manage our own portfolios - is important to understand all of the risks in those companies/algorithms and understand what is source of their income. We could often pack them together in one group. And those groups don't have to be called asset classes. Beter name for those groups would be risk premiums then asset classes.

Algorithm/company could be part of more risk premium groups. But we would try to find most characteristic springs of several important risk premiums and work only with them. Then we would apply money management and pack those risk premiums together to one optimalized portfolio.