The Flexible Investing Playbook. Asset Allocation Strategies for Long-Term Success

Make the smartest choices you can with this must-have read for investors by one of the world's legendary value investors World-renowned investor Francisco Garc?a Param?s shares his advice and tips on making smart investments in this must-have book for those looking to make smarter choices for their portfolio. Investing for the Long Term is divided in two parts. The first is formed by three chapters covering Francisco's education and first steps, his initial experience as an investor working alone, and the team work after 2003. This riveting section covers the end of the biggest bull market of the 20th century and the technological and financial crashes of 2000 and 2008. How the team dealt with all that is an interesting personal account that can help you deal with similar situations, should they occur. The second part of the book covers the cornerstones of Francisco's philosophy. It starts with a chapter in Austrian economics, in his view the only sensible approach to economics, which has helped him enormously over the years. It follows with an explanation of why one has to invest in real assets, and specifically in shares, to maintain the purchasing power of ones savings, avoiding paper money (fixed income) at all costs. The rest of the book shows how to invest in shares. Discover the amazing investing principles of one of the most successfully fund managers in the world Examine how one man and his company weathered the two of modern times’ biggest economic crashes Learn how to safely invest your savings Value investing and effective stock-picking underlie some of the world's most successful investment strategies, which is why Investing for the Long Term is a must-have read for all investors, young and old, who wish to improve their stock selection abilities.

An easy-to-understand how-to guide to the single most important thing you can do in investing – choosing and mixing your assets successfully. You don’t need to be an expert analyst, a star stock-picker, or a rocket scientist to have better investment results than most other investors. You just need to allocate your assets in the right way, and have the conviction to stick with that allocation. The big secret behind asset allocation – the secret that most sophisticated investors know and use to their benefit – is that it’s really not all that hard to do. Asset Allocation For Dummies serves as a comprehensive guide to maximizing returns and minimizing risk – while managing taxes, fees and other costs – in putting together a portfolio to reflect your unique financial goals. Jerry A. Miccolis (Basking Ridge, NJ), CFA®, CFP®, FCAS, MAAA is a widely quoted expert commentator who has been interviewed in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and appeared on CBS Radio and ABC-TV. He is a senior financial advisor and co-owner of Brinton Eaton Wealth Advisors (www.brintoneaton.com), a fee-only investment management, tax advisory and financial planning firm in Madison, N.J. Dorianne R. Perrucci (Scotch Plains, NJ) is a freelance writer who has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and TheStreet.com, and has collaborated on several financial books, including I.O.U.S.A, One Nation, Under Stress, In Debt (Wiley, 2008).

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.

Praise for ETFs For The Long Run «As the title of the book suggests, ETFs are going to be an increasingly important reality for a broad class of investors in coming years. This book offers the reader real understanding of this growing force in our economic lives.» —Robert J. Shiller, Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University, Co-founder and Chief Economist at MacroMarkets LLC «ETFs for the Long Run is a fascinating read. A seasoned financial industry journalist, Lawrence Carrel does an excellent job of highlighting exchange traded funds' meteoric rise in popularity over the last few years. A terrific book for anyone looking to grasp the ABCs of ETF investing.» —Jerry Moskowitz, President, FTSE Americas Inc. "ETFs for the Long Run provides a unique combination of a detailed history of the development of ETFs, a clear explanation of the sophisticated mechanics of ETFs, an assessment of investors' choices amongst this dynamic product area, and unbiased recommendations for appropriate portfolio allocation to these efficient investment tools. Lawrence Carrel has done investors and the industry a great service in pulling these four elements together in a highly readable and often entertaining book. —Steven Schoenfeld, Chief Investment Officer, Global Quantitative Management, Northern Trust, and Editor, Active Index Investing Despite the incredible growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the fact they've been on the market for fifteen years, some investors are still either unaware of the effectiveness of ETFs or unsure of how to use them in their investment endeavors. That's why respected ETF expert and journalist Lawrence Carrel has written ETFs for the Long Run. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, this reliable resource puts ETFs in perspective and reveals how they can help you profit in both up and down markets. Page by page, Carrel takes you through the ins and outs of ETFs, including their history, the tax benefits and minimal charges associated with them, and the fundamental differences between ETFs and other types of investments. He also provides you with the resources and tools needed to trade ETFs and build your own ETF portfolio. You may have heard about ETFs while researching other investments or speaking with an investment advisor. If you want to learn more about them, this book will provide you with a clear understanding of what ETFs are, how they work, and how they can be used to create a low-cost, liquid, and diversified portfolio.

An authoritative resource for the wealth management industry that bridges the gap between modern perspectives on asset allocation and practical implementation An advanced yet practical dive into the world of asset allocation , Modern Asset Allocation for Wealth Management provides the knowledge financial advisors and their robo-advisor counterparts need to reclaim ownership of the asset allocation component of their fiduciary responsibility. Wealth management practitioners are commonly taught the traditional mean-variance approach in CFA and similar curricula, a method with increasingly limited applicability given the evolution of investment products and our understanding of real-world client preferences. Additionally, financial advisors and researchers typically receive little to no training on how to implement a robust asset allocation framework, a conceptually simple yet practically very challenging task. This timely book offers professional wealth managers and researchers an up-to-date and implementable toolset for managing client portfolios.  The information presented in this book far exceeds the basic models and heuristics most commonly used today, presenting advances in asset allocation that have been isolated to academic and institutional portfolio management settings until now, while simultaneously providing a clear framework that advisors can immediately deploy. This rigorous manuscript covers all aspects of creating client portfolios: setting client risk preferences, deciding which assets to include in the portfolio mix, forecasting future asset performance, and running an optimization to set a final allocation. An important resource for all wealth management fiduciaries, this book enables readers to: Implement a rigorous yet streamlined asset allocation framework that they can stand behind with conviction Deploy both neo-classical and behavioral elements of client preferences to more accurately establish a client risk profile Incorporate client financial goals into the asset allocation process systematically and precisely with a simple balance sheet model Create a systematic framework for justifying which assets should be included in client portfolios Build capital market assumptions from historical data via a statistically sound and intuitive process Run optimization methods that respect complex client preferences and real-world asset characteristics Modern Asset Allocation for Wealth Management is ideal for practicing financial advisors and researchers in both traditional and robo-advisor settings, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on asset allocation.

Praise for FINDING THE HOT SPOTS «David Riedel's Finding the Hot Spots provides keen insights into the new reality of investing with a global perspective. Internationally diversified investment portfolios reduce risk while enhancing returns, as many American-based individual and institutional investors have discovered in recent years. Riedel succeeds in providing simple, effective tools and strategies.» –J. Craig Chapman Managing Director, Long-Term Asset Management (HK) Limited «Finding the Hot Spots simplifies and demystifies international investing and makes non-U.S. markets alluring and accessible . . . a must-read for all individual investors.» –John D. Meserve Chairman, BNY Jaywalk, Inc. «Anyone considering investing in emerging markets should begin by reading David Riedel's Finding the Hot Spots. This excellent book explains how to reap the benefits while avoiding the risks of investing in the world's fastest growing economies. Having worked with David in Thailand during the peak of the Bangkok Bubble in the mid-1990s, I believe few people are more qualified to write about this subject than he is.» –Richard Duncan Author of The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures

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.

Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs will give you the information you need to understand how angel investors think, as well as how to identify investor expectations, understand the investment analysis process, and prepare for post-investment requirements. Written by Susan Preston, an experienced angel investor, worldwide speaker and consultant on angel financing, and former Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneur-in-Residence, this hands-on resource, explains the factors that determine how private equity investors spend their money and what they expect from entrepreneurs. For example: Most venture capitalists do not invest in seed or start-up financing rounds Investors typically require seasoned management, with successful start-up experience Investors are looking for entrepreneurs with passion for their ideas and the willingness to take and apply sound advice Business plans must be well-written with detailed financial projections that extend 3–5 years Investors are looking for a clear path to profitability in the business model Entrepreneurs must have developed a corporate structure that is clean and uncomplicated And much more

Acclaim for Joel Greenblatt's New York Times bestseller THE LITTLE BOOK THAT BEATS THE MARKET «One of the best, clearest guides to value investing out there.» —Wall Street Journal «Simply perfect. One of the most important investment books of the last fifty years!» —Michael Price «A landmark book-a stunningly simple and low-risk way to significantly beat the market!» —Michael Steinhardt, the dean of Wall Street hedge-fund managers «The best book on the subject in years.» —Financial Times «The best thing about this book-from which I intend to steal liberally for the next edition of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need-is that most people won't believe it. . . . That's good, because the more people who know about a good thing, the more expensive that thing ordinarily becomes. . . .» —Andrew Tobias, author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need «This book is the finest simple distillation of modern value investing principles ever written. It should be mandatory reading for all serious investors from the fourth grade on up.» —Professor Bruce Greenwald, director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing, Columbia Business School