Generate solid, long-term profits with a portfolio allocated for your investing needs Asset allocation is the key to investing performance. Unfortunately, no single approach works perfectly—developing the right balance requires a clear-eyed look at the many models available to you, various investing methodologies, and your or your client’s level of risk tolerance. And that’s where this important guide comes in. Written by a leading allocation expert from T. Rowe Price, Beyond Diversification provides the knowledge, insights, and approaches you need to make the best allocation decisions for your goals. This deep dive into the how’s and why’s of asset allocation is organized by the three decisive components of a successfully allocated portfolio: Return Forecasting discusses the desired return investors seek. Risk Forecasting covers the level of risk investors are prepared to assume to achieve that return. Portfolio Construction calibrates the stock-bond mix that balances the risks and returns. With examples from T. Rowe Price’s asset allocation team showing you how the process works in the real world, Beyond Diversification provides everything you need to find the asset combination that will deliver the results you seek. You’ll learn how to choose the right tradeoffs, build the most effective asset allocation combination for your needs, and dramatically increase your odds of success for the long run.

WHEN IT COMES TO INVESTING FOR YOUR FUTURE, THERE'S ONLY ONE SURE BET—ASSET ALLOCATION THE EASY WAY TO GET STARTED Everything You Need to Know About How To: Implement a smart asset allocation strategy Diversify your investments with stocks, bonds,real estate, and other classes Change your allocation and lock in gains Trying to outwit the market is a bad gamble. If you're serious about investing for the long run, you have to take a no-nonsense, businesslike approach to your portfolio. In addition to covering all the basics, this new edition of All About Asset Allocation includes timely advice on: Learning which investments work well together and why Selecting the right mutual funds and ETFs Creating an asset allocation that’s right for your needs Knowing how and when to change an allocation Understanding target-date mutual funds "All About Asset Allocation offers advice that is both prudent and practical--keep it simple, diversify, and, above all, keep your expenses low--from an author who both knows how vital asset allocation is to investment success and, most important, works with real people." -- John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO, The Vanguard Group "With All About Asset Allocation at your side, you'll be executing a sound investment plan, using the best materials and wearing the best safety rope that money can buy." -- William Bernstein, founder and author, The Intelligent Asset Allocator

Time-Tested Techniques - Safe, Simple, and Proven Effective - for Building Your Own Investment Portfolio. "As its title suggest, Bill Bernstein's fine book honors the sensible principles of Benjamin Graham in the Intelligent Investor Bernstein's concepts are sound, his writing crystal clear, and his exposition orderly. Any reader who takes the time and effort to understand his approach to the crucial subject of asset allocation will surely be rewarded with enhanced long-term returns." - John C. Bogle, Founder and former Chief Executive Officer, The Vanguard Group President, Bogle Financial Markets Research Center Author, common Sense on Mutual Funds. "Bernstein has become a guru to a peculiarly '90s group: well-educated, Internet-powered people intent on investing well - and with minimal 'help' from professional Wall Street." - Robert Barker, Columnist, BusinessWeek. "I go home and tell my wife sometimes, 'I wonder if [Bernstein] doesn't know more than me.' It's humbling." - John Rekenthaler, Research Chief, Morningstar Inc. William Bernstein is an unlikely financial hero. A practicing neurologist, he used his self-taught investment knowledge and research to build one of today's most respected investor's websites. Now, let his plain-spoken The Intelligent Asset Allocator show you how to use the time-honored techniques of asset allocation to build your own pathway to financial security - one that is easy-to-understand, easier-to-apply, and supported by 75 years of solid history and wealth-building results.

Investment professional Larry E. Swedroe describes the crucial difference between "active" and "passive" mutual funds, and tells you how you can win the investment game through long-term investments in such indexes as the S&P 500 instead of through the active buying and selling of stocks. A revised and updated edition of an investment classic, The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need remains clear, understandable, and effective. This edition contains a new chapter comparing index funds, ETFs, and passive asset class funds, an expanded section on portfolio care and maintenance, the addition of Swedroe's 15 Rules of Prudent Investing, and much more. In clear language, Swedroe shows how the newer index mutual funds out-earn, out-perform, and out-compound the older funds, and how to select a balance "passive" portfolio for the long hail that will repay you many times over. This indispensable book also provides you with valuable information about: - The efficiency of markets today - The five factors that determine expected returns of a balanced equity and fixed income portfolio - Important facts about volatility, return, and risk - Six steps to building a diversified portfolio using Modern Portfolio Theory - Implementing the winning strategy - and more.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

PRAISE FOR THE LONG GOOD BUY: "Oppenheimer offers brilliant insights, sage advice and entertaining anecdotes. Anyone wishing to understand how financial markets behave – and misbehave – should read this book now." Stephen D. King, economist and author of Grave New World: The End of Globalisation, the Return of History "Peter has always been one of the masters of dissecting financial markets performance into an understandable narrative, and in this book, he pulls together much of his great thinking and style from his career, and it should be useful for anyone trying to understand what drives markets, especially equities." Lord Jim O'Neill, Chair, Chatham House "A deeply insightful analysis of market cycles and their drivers that really does add to our practical understanding of what moves markets and long-term investment returns." Keith Skeoch, CEO, Standard Life Aberdeen "This book eloquently blends the author's vast experience with behavioural finance insights to document and understand financial booms and busts. The book should be basic reading for any student of finance." Elias Papaioannou, Professor of Economics, London Business School "This is an excellent book, capturing the insights of a leading market practitioner within the structured analytical framework he has developed over many years. It offers a lively and unique perspective on how markets work and where they are headed." Huw Pill, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School "The Long Good Buy is an excellent introduction to understanding the cycles, trends and crises in financial markets over the past 100 years. Its purpose is to help investors assess risk and the probabilities of different outcomes. It is lucidly written in a simple logical way, requires no mathematical expertise and draws on an amazing collection of historical data and research. For me it is the best and most comprehensive introduction to the subject that exists." Lord Brian Griffiths, Chairman - Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, Oxford

Build an agile, responsive portfolio with a new approach to global asset allocation Adaptive Asset Allocation is a no-nonsense how-to guide for dynamic portfolio management. Written by the team behind Gestaltu.com, this book walks you through a uniquely objective and unbiased investment philosophy and provides clear guidelines for execution. From foundational concepts and timing to forecasting and portfolio optimization, this book shares insightful perspective on portfolio adaptation that can improve any investment strategy. Accessible explanations of both classical and contemporary research support the methodologies presented, bolstered by the authors' own capstone case study showing the direct impact of this approach on the individual investor. Financial advisors are competing in an increasingly commoditized environment, with the added burden of two substantial bear markets in the last 15 years. This book presents a framework that addresses the major challenges both advisors and investors face, emphasizing the importance of an agile, globally-diversified portfolio. Drill down to the most important concepts in wealth management Optimize portfolio performance with careful timing of savings and withdrawals Forecast returns 80% more accurately than assuming long-term averages Adopt an investment framework for stability, growth, and maximum income An optimized portfolio must be structured in a way that allows quick response to changes in asset class risks and relationships, and the flexibility to continually adapt to market changes. To execute such an ambitious strategy, it is essential to have a strong grasp of foundational wealth management concepts, a reliable system of forecasting, and a clear understanding of the merits of individual investment methods. Adaptive Asset Allocation provides critical background information alongside a streamlined framework for improving portfolio performance.

We are entering a golden age of alternative investments. Alternative asset classes including private equity, hedge funds, catastrophe reinsurance, real assets, non-traditional credit, alternative risk premia, digital assets, collectibles, and other novel assets are now available to investors and their advisors in a way that they never have been before. The pursuit of diversification is not as straightforward as it once was — and the classic 60/40 portfolio may no longer be sufficient in helping investors achieve their most important financial goals. With the ever-present need for sustainable income and risk management, alternative assets are poised to play a more prominent role in investor portfolios. Phil Huber is the Chief Investment Officer for a multi-billion dollar wealth management firm and acts as your guide on a journey through the past, present, and future of alternative investments. In this groundbreaking tour de force, he provides detailed coverage across the spectrum of alternative assets: their risk and return characteristics, methods to gain exposure, and how to fit everything into a balanced portfolio. The three parts of The Allocator’s Edge address: 1. Why the future may present challenges for traditional portfolios; why the adoption of alternatives has remained elusive for many allocators; and why the case for alternatives is more compelling than ever thanks to financial evolution and innovation. 2. A comprehensive survey of the asset classes and strategies that comprise the vast universe of alternative investments. 3. How to build durable and resilient portfolios that harness alternative assets; and how to sharpen the client communication skills needed to establish proper expectations and make the unfamiliar familiar. The Allocator’s Edge is written with the practitioner in mind, providing financial advisors, institutional allocators, and other professional investors the confidence and courage needed to effectively understand, implement, and translate alternatives for their clients. Alternative investments are the allocator’s edge for the portfolios of tomorrow — and this is the essential guide for advisors and investors looking to seize the opportunity.

Since the formalization of asset allocation in 1952 with the publication of Portfolio Selection by Harry Markowitz, there have been great strides made to enhance the application of this groundbreaking theory. However, progress has been uneven. It has been punctuated with instances of misleading research, which has contributed to the stubborn persistence of certain fallacies about asset allocation. A Practitioner's Guide to Asset Allocation fills a void in the literature by offering a hands-on resource that describes the many important innovations that address key challenges to asset allocation and dispels common fallacies about asset allocation. The authors cover the fundamentals of asset allocation, including a discussion of the attributes that qualify a group of securities as an asset class and a detailed description of the conventional application of mean-variance analysis to asset allocation.. The authors review a number of common fallacies about asset allocation and dispel these misconceptions with logic or hard evidence. The fallacies debunked include such notions as: asset allocation determines more than 90% of investment performance; time diversifies risk; optimization is hypersensitive to estimation error; factors provide greater diversification than assets and are more effective at reducing noise; and that equally weighted portfolios perform more reliably out of sample than optimized portfolios. A Practitioner's Guide to Asset Allocation also explores the innovations that address key challenges to asset allocation and presents an alternative optimization procedure to address the idea that some investors have complex preferences and returns may not be elliptically distributed. Among the challenges highlighted, the authors explain how to overcome inefficiencies that result from constraints by expanding the optimization objective function to incorporate absolute and relative goals simultaneously. The text also explores the challenge of currency risk, describes how to use shadow assets and liabilities to unify liquidity with expected return and risk, and shows how to evaluate alternative asset mixes by assessing exposure to loss throughout the investment horizon based on regime-dependent risk. This practical text contains an illustrative example of asset allocation which is used to demonstrate the impact of the innovations described throughout the book. In addition, the book includes supplemental material that summarizes the key takeaways and includes information on relevant statistical and theoretical concepts, as well as a comprehensive glossary of terms.

Discover a masterful exploration of the fallacies and challenges of asset allocation In Asset Allocation: From Theory to Practice and Beyond—the newly and substantially revised Second Edition of A Practitioner’s Guide to Asset Allocation—accomplished finance professionals William Kinlaw, Mark P. Kritzman, and David Turkington deliver a robust and insightful exploration of the core tenets of asset allocation. Drawing on their experience working with hundreds of the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors, the authors review foundational concepts, debunk fallacies, and address cutting-edge themes like factor investing and scenario analysis. The new edition also includes references to related topics at the end of each chapter and a summary of key takeaways to help readers rapidly locate material of interest. The book also incorporates discussions of: The characteristics that define an asset class, including stability, investability, and similarity The fundamentals of asset allocation, including definitions of expected return, portfolio risk, and diversification Advanced topics like factor investing, asymmetric diversification, fat tails, long-term investing, and enhanced scenario analysis as well as tools to address challenges such as liquidity, rebalancing, constraints, and within-horizon risk. Perfect for client-facing practitioners as well as scholars who seek to understand practical techniques, Asset Allocation: From Theory to Practice and Beyond is a must-read resource from an author team of distinguished finance experts and a forward by Nobel prize winner Harry Markowitz.