Active Portfolio Management: A Quantitative Approach for Producing Superior Returns and Selecting Superior Returns and Controlling Risk


Book Description

"This new edition of Active Portfolio Management continues the standard of excellence established in the first edition, with new and clear insights to help investment professionals." -William E. Jacques, Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Martingale Asset Management. "Active Portfolio Management offers investors an opportunity to better understand the balance between manager skill and portfolio risk. Both fundamental and quantitative investment managers will benefit from studying this updated edition by Grinold and Kahn." -Scott Stewart, Portfolio Manager, Fidelity Select Equity ® Discipline Co-Manager, Fidelity Freedom ® Funds. "This Second edition will not remain on the shelf, but will be continually referenced by both novice and expert. There is a substantial expansion in both depth and breadth on the original. It clearly and concisely explains all aspects of the foundations and the latest thinking in active portfolio management." -Eric N. Remole, Managing Director, Head of Global Structured Equity, Credit Suisse Asset Management. Mathematically rigorous and meticulously organized, Active Portfolio Management broke new ground when it first became available to investment managers in 1994. By outlining an innovative process to uncover raw signals of asset returns, develop them into refined forecasts, then use those forecasts to construct portfolios of exceptional return and minimal risk, i.e., portfolios that consistently beat the market, this hallmark book helped thousands of investment managers. Active Portfolio Management, Second Edition, now sets the bar even higher. Like its predecessor, this volume details how to apply economics, econometrics, and operations research to solving practical investment problems, and uncovering superior profit opportunities. It outlines an active management framework that begins with a benchmark portfolio, then defines exceptional returns as they relate to that benchmark. Beyond the comprehensive treatment of the active management process covered previously, this new edition expands to cover asset allocation, long/short investing, information horizons, and other topics relevant today. It revisits a number of discussions from the first edition, shedding new light on some of today's most pressing issues, including risk, dispersion, market impact, and performance analysis, while providing empirical evidence where appropriate. The result is an updated, comprehensive set of strategic concepts and rules of thumb for guiding the process of-and increasing the profits from-active investment management.




Quantitative Management of Bond Portfolios


Book Description

The practice of institutional bond portfolio management has changed markedly since the late 1980s in response to new financial instruments, investment methodologies, and improved analytics. Investors are looking for a more disciplined, quantitative approach to asset management. Here, five top authorities from a leading Wall Street firm provide practical solutions and feasible methodologies based on investor inquiries. While taking a quantitative approach, they avoid complex mathematical derivations, making the book accessible to a wide audience, including portfolio managers, plan sponsors, research analysts, risk managers, academics, students, and anyone interested in bond portfolio management. The book covers a range of subjects of concern to fixed-income portfolio managers--investment style, benchmark replication and customization, managing credit and mortgage portfolios, managing central bank reserves, risk optimization, and performance attribution. The first part contains empirical studies of security selection versus asset allocation, index replication with derivatives and bonds, optimal portfolio diversification, and long-horizon performance of assets. The second part covers portfolio management tools for risk budgeting, bottom-up risk modeling, performance attribution, innovative measures of risk sensitivities, and hedging risk exposures. A first-of-its-kind publication from a team of practitioners at the front lines of financial thinking, this book presents a winning combination of mathematical models, intuitive examples, and clear language.




Winning at Active Management


Book Description

Winning at Active Management conducts an in-depth examination of crucial issues facing the investment management industry, and will be a valuable resource for asset managers, institutional consultants, managers of pension and endowment funds, and advisers to individual investors. Bill Priest, Steve Bleiberg and Mike Welhoelter all experienced investment professionals, consider the challenges of managing portfolios through complex markets, as well as managing the cultural and technological complexities of the investment business. The book’s initial section highlights the importance of culture within an investment firm – the characteristics of strong cultures, the imperatives of communication and support, and suggestions for leading firms through times of both adversity and prosperity. It continues with a thorough discussion of active portfolio management for equities. The ongoing debate over active versus passive management is reviewed in detail, drawing on both financial theory and real-world investing results. The book also contrasts traditional methods of portfolio management, based on accounting metrics and price-earnings ratios, with Epoch Investment Partners’ philosophy of investing on free cash flow and appropriate capital allocation. Winning at Active Management closes with an inquiry into the crucial and growing role of technology in investing. The authors assert that the most effective portfolio strategies result from neither pure fundamental nor quantitative methods, but instead from thoughtful combinations of analyst and portfolio manager experience and skill with the speed and breadth of quantitative analysis. The authors illustrate the point with an example of an innovative Epoch equity strategy based on economic logic and judgment, but enabled by information technology. Winning at Active Management also offers important insights into selecting active managers – the market cycle factors that have held back many managers’ performance in recent years, and the difficulty of identifying those firms that truly possess investment skill. Drawing on behavioral economic theory and empirical research, the book makes a convincing case that many active investment managers can and do generate returns superior to those of the broad market.




Advances in Active Portfolio Management: New Developments in Quantitative Investing


Book Description

From the leading authorities in their field—the newest, most effective tools for avoiding common pitfalls while maximizing profits through active portfolio management Whether you’re a portfolio manager, financial adviser, or investing novice, this important follow-up to the classic guide to active portfolio management delivers everything you need to beat the market at every turn. Advances in Active Portfolio Management gets you fully up to date on the issues, trends, and challenges in the world of active management—and shows how to apply advances in the Grinold and Kahn’s legendary approach to meet current challenges. Composed of articles published in today’s leading management publications—including several that won Journal of Portfolio Management’s prestigious Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award—this comprehensive guide is filled with new insights into: • Dynamic Portfolio Management • Signal Weighting • Implementation Efficiency • Holdings-based attribution • Expected returns • Risk management • Portfolio construction • Fees Providing everything you need to master active portfolio management in today’s investing landscape, the book is organized into three sections: the fundamentals of successful active management, advancing the authors’ framework, and applying the framework in today’s investing landscape. The culmination of many decades of investing experience and research, Advances in Active Portfolio Managementmakes complex issues easy to understand and put into practice. It’s the one-stop resource you need to succeed in the world of investing today.




Pioneering Portfolio Management


Book Description

In the years since the now-classic Pioneering Portfolio Management was first published, the global investment landscape has changed dramatically -- but the results of David Swensen's investment strategy for the Yale University endowment have remained as impressive as ever. Year after year, Yale's portfolio has trumped the marketplace by a wide margin, and, with over $20 billion added to the endowment under his twenty-three-year tenure, Swensen has contributed more to Yale's finances than anyone ever has to any university in the country. What may have seemed like one among many success stories in the era before the Internet bubble burst emerges now as a completely unprecedented institutional investment achievement. In this fully revised and updated edition, Swensen, author of the bestselling personal finance guide Unconventional Success, describes the investment process that underpins Yale's endowment. He provides lucid and penetrating insight into the world of institutional funds management, illuminating topics ranging from asset-allocation structures to active fund management. Swensen employs an array of vivid real-world examples, many drawn from his own formidable experience, to address critical concepts such as handling risk, selecting advisors, and weathering market pitfalls. Swensen offers clear and incisive advice, especially when describing a counterintuitive path. Conventional investing too often leads to buying high and selling low. Trust is more important than flash-in-the-pan success. Expertise, fortitude, and the long view produce positive results where gimmicks and trend following do not. The original Pioneering Portfolio Management outlined a commonsense template for structuring a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio. This new edition provides fund managers and students of the market an up-to-date guide for actively managed investment portfolios.




Artificial Intelligence in Asset Management


Book Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown in presence in asset management and has revolutionized the sector in many ways. It has improved portfolio management, trading, and risk management practices by increasing efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. In particular, AI techniques help construct portfolios based on more accurate risk and return forecasts and more complex constraints. Trading algorithms use AI to devise novel trading signals and execute trades with lower transaction costs. AI also improves risk modeling and forecasting by generating insights from new data sources. Finally, robo-advisors owe a large part of their success to AI techniques. Yet the use of AI can also create new risks and challenges, such as those resulting from model opacity, complexity, and reliance on data integrity.




The Right Answer to the Wrong Question


Book Description

The debate over the value of active portfolio management has often centered on whether the average active manager is capable of producing returns that exceed expectations. We argue that a more useful way to frame this issue is to focus on identifying those managers who are the most likely to generate superior risk-adjusted returns (i.e., alpha) in the future. Using a style-classified sample of mutual funds, we document several tractable relationships between observable fund characteristics and its future alpha, most notably the tendency for performance to persist over time. While median managers produce positive risk-adjusted performance approximately 45% of the time, we document a selection process that improves an investor's probability of identifying a superior active manager to almost 60%. We conclude that there is a place in the investor's portfolio for the properly chosen active manager.




Behavioral Portfolio Management


Book Description

The investment industry is on the cusp of a major shift, from Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to Behavioral Finance, with Behavioral Portfolio Management (BMP) the next step in this transition. BPM focuses on how to harness the price distortions that are driven by emotional crowds and use this to create superior portfolios. Once markets and investing are viewed through the lens of behavior, and portfolios are constructed on this basis, investable opportunities become readily apparent. Mastering your emotions is critical to the process and the insights provided by Tom Howard put investors on the path to achieving this. Forty years of Behavioral Science research presents a clear picture of how individuals make decisions; there are few signs of rationality. Indeed, emotional investors sabotage their own efforts in building long-horizon wealth. When this is combined with the misconception that active management is unable to generate superior returns, the typical emotional investor leaves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on the table during their investment lifetimes. Howard moves on to show how industry practice, with its use of the style grid, standard deviation, correlation, maximum drawdown and the Sharpe ratio, has entrenched emotion within investing. The result is that investors construct underperforming, bubble-wrapped portfolios. So if an investor masters their own emotions, they still must challenge the emotionally-based conventional wisdom pervasive throughout the industry. Tom Howard explains how to do this. Attention is then given to measureable and persistent behavioral factors. These provide investors with a new source of information that has the potential to transform how they think about portfolio management and dramatically improve performance. Behavioral factors can be used to select the best stocks, the best active managers, and the best markets in which to invest. Once the transition to behavioral finance is made, the emotional measures of MPT will quickly be forgotten and replaced with rational concepts that allow investors to successfully build long-horizon wealth. If you take portfolio construction seriously, it is essential that you make the next step forward towards Behavioral Portfolio Management.




The Current State of Quantitative Equity Investing


Book Description

Quantitative equity management techniques are helping investors achieve more risk efficient and appropriate investment outcomes. Factor investing, vetted by decades of prior and current research, is growing quickly, particularly in in the form of smart-beta and ETF strategies. Dynamic factor-timing approaches, incorporating macroeconomic and investment conditions, are in the early stages but will likely thrive. A new generation of big data approaches are rendering quantitative equity analysis even more powerful and encompassing.




Modern Portfolio Management


Book Description

Active 130/30 Extensions is the newest wave of disciplined investment strategies that involves asymmetric decision-making on long/short portfolio decisions, concentrated investment risk-taking in contrast to diversification, systematic portfolio risk management, and flexibility in portfolio design. This strategy is the building block for a number of 130/30 and 120/20 investment strategies offered to institutional and sophisticated high net worth individual investors who want to manage their portfolios actively and aggressively to outperform the market.