Debunking outdated and inaccurate beliefs about investment management and reveals the new realities of the post-modern financial markets There have been a lot of big changes in the investment world over the past decade, and many long-cherished beliefs about the structures and performance of various investments no longer apply. Unfortunately the news seems not to have reached many thought leaders and investment professionals who persist in trying, and failing, to apply 20th-century thinking to 21st-century portfolio management. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the subject of alternative investments. Written by an all-star team of investment management experts, this book debunks common myths and misconceptions about most classes of alternative investments and offers valuable advice on how to develop investment management and asset allocation strategies consistent with the new realities of the ever-changing world of alternative investments. Covers most alternative asset classes, including private equity, real estate, managed futures, hedge funds, commodity indices, and more Debunks long-held assumptions about the structure and performance of various investment classes that continue to dominate the industry Explores the implications for investment managers of the proliferation of international marketable securities and global financial markets Provides an overview of both the micro and the macro aspects of each alternative investment class

This survey of portfolio theory, from its modern origins through more sophisticated, “postmodern” incarnations, evaluates portfolio risk according to the first four moments of any statistical distribution: mean, variance, skewness, and excess kurtosis. In pursuit of financial models that more accurately describe abnormal markets and investor psychology, this book bifurcates beta on either side of mean returns. It then evaluates this traditional risk measure according to its relative volatility and correlation components. After specifying a four-moment capital asset pricing model, this book devotes special attention to measures of market risk in global banking regulation. Despite the deficiencies of modern portfolio theory, contemporary finance continues to rest on mean-variance optimization and the two-moment capital asset pricing model. The term postmodern portfolio theory captures many of the advances in financial learning since the original articulation of modern portfolio theory. A comprehensive approach to financial risk management must address all aspects of portfolio theory, from the beautiful symmetries of modern portfolio theory to the disturbing behavioral insights and the vastly expanded mathematical arsenal of the postmodern critique. Mastery of postmodern portfolio theory’s quantitative tools and behavioral insights holds the key to the efficient frontier of risk management.

Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters tells the story of how Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) revolutionized the investing world and the real economy, but is now showing its age. MPT has no mechanism to understand its impacts on the environmental, social and financial systems, nor any tools for investors to mitigate the havoc that systemic risks can wreck on their portfolios. It’s time for MPT to evolve. The authors propose a new imperative to improve finance’s ability to fulfil its twin main purposes: providing adequate returns to individuals and directing capital to where it is needed in the economy. They show how some of the largest investors in the world focus not on picking stocks, but on mitigating systemic risks, such as climate change and a lack of gender diversity, so as to improve the risk/return of the market as a whole, despite current theory saying that should be impossible. "Moving beyond MPT" recognizes the complex relations between investing and the systems on which capital markets rely, "Investing that matters" embraces MPT’s focus on diversification and risk adjusted return, but understands them in the context of the real economy and the total return needs of investors. Whether an investor, an MBA student, a Finance Professor or a sustainability professional, Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters is thought-provoking and relevant. Its bold critique shows how the real world already is moving beyond investing orthodoxy.

Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis, 9th Editionexamines the characteristics and analysis of individual securities, as well as the theory and practice of optimally combining securities into portfolios. It stresses the economic intuition behind the subject matter while presenting advanced concepts of investment analysis and portfolio management. The authors present material that captures the state of modern portfolio analysis, general equilibrium theory, and investment analysis in an accessible and intuitive manner.

In recent years portfolio optimization and construction methodologies have become an increasingly critical ingredient of asset and fund management, while at the same time portfolio risk assessment has become an essential ingredient in risk management. This trend will only accelerate in the coming years. This practical handbook fills the gap between current university instruction and current industry practice. It provides a comprehensive computationally-oriented treatment of modern portfolio optimization and construction methods using the powerful NUOPT for S-PLUS optimizer.

Get a practical and thoroughly updated look at investment and portfolio management from an accomplished veteran of the discipline In Modern Portfolio Management: Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory, investment executive and advisor Dr. Todd E. Petzel delivers a grounded and insightful exploration of developments in finance since the advent of Modern Portfolio Theory. You’ll find the tools and concepts you need to evaluate new products and portfolios and identify practical issues in areas like operations, decision-making, and regulation. In this book, you’ll also: Discover why Modern Portfolio Theory is at odds with developments in the field of Behavioral Finance Examine the never-ending argument between passive and active management and learn to set long-term goals and objectives Find investor perspectives on perennial issues like corporate governance, manager turnover, fraud risks, and ESG investing Perfect for institutional and individual investors, investment committee members, and fiduciaries responsible for portfolio construction and oversight, Modern Portfolio Management is also a must-read for fund and portfolio managers who seek to better understand their investors.

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.

This book combines the study of rhetoric, history, philosophy, philosophy of statistics and the culture of investing to discuss the foundations of stochastical predictability in investment theory. Besides discussing the problem of stochastical prediction, the book also covers alternative investment theories. Ideas from uncertainty economics, expressed by the likes of Keynes, Knight, von Mises, Taleb and McCloskey are also discussed. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of investment theory, as well as investment practitioners.

This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining. In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.