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	<title>Loan advice</title>
	<link>http://www.loan-advice.org</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:43:04 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Prices motivate economic players</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Market prices establish a reward-penalty (profit-loss) structure that encourages people to work, cooperate with others, use efficient production methods, supply goods that are intensely desired by others, and invest for the future. Self-interested entrepreneurs will seek to produce only the goods consumers value enough to pay a price sufficient to cover production cost. Self-interest will [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/prices-motivate-economic-players/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Nature of Liabilities</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The nature of an institutional investor’s liabilities will dictate the general investment strategy to pursue. Depository institutions, for example, seek to generate income by the spread between the return that they earn on their assets and the cost of their funds. Life insurance companies are in the spread business. Pension funds are not in the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/nature-of-liabilities/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Institutional Investors</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Managers of the funds of financial entities manage those funds to meet specified investment objectives. For many institutional investors (insurance companies, pension funds, investment companies, depository institutions, and endowments and foundations), those objectives are dictated by the nature of their liabilities. It is within the context of the asset/liability problem faced by managers of institutional [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/institutional-investors/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Role of Financial Intermediaries</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Financial intermediaries obtain funds by issuing financial claims against themselves to market participants and then investing those funds. The investments made by financial intermediaries—their assets—can be in loans and/or securities. These investments are referred to as direct investments. As just noted, financial intermediaries play the basic role of transforming financial assets that are less desirable [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/role-of-financial-intermediaries/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>INDUSTRY’S EVALUATION OF MODELING TOOLS</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A recent study by The Intertek Group tried to assess how the use of financial modeling in asset management had changed over the highly volatile period from 2000 to 2002. Participants in the study included 44 heads of asset management firms in Europe and North America; more than half were from the biggest firms in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/industry%e2%80%99s-evaluation-of-modeling-tools/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Advances in information technology are behind the widespread adoption of modeling in finance. The most important advance has been the enormous increase in the amount of computing power, concurrent with a steep fall in prices. Government agencies have long been using computers for economic modeling, but private firms found it economically justifiable only as of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/the-role-of-information-technology/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>FINANCIAL ENGINEERING IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In its modern sense, financial engineering is the design (or engineering) of contracts and portfolios of contracts that result in predetermined cash flows contingent to different events. Broadly speaking, financial engineering is used to manage investments and risk. The objective is the transfer of risk from one entity to another via appropriate contracts. Though the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/financial-engineering-in-historical-perspective/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Measuring and Evaluating Performance</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The measurement and evaluation of investment performance is the last step in the investment management process. Actually, it is misleading to say that it is the last step since the investment management process is an ongoing process. This step involves measuring the performance of the portfolio and then evaluating that performance relative to some benchmark.
Although [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/measuring-and-evaluating-performance/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Approaches to Portfolio Construction</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Constructing an efficient portfolio based on the expected return for a portfolio (which depends on the expected return of all the asset returns in the portfolio) and the variance of the portfolio’s return (which depends on the variance of the return of all of the assets in the portfolio and the covariance of returns between [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/approaches-to-portfolio-construction/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Inputs Required</title>
		<description><![CDATA[To construct an efficient portfolio, the investor must be able to quantify risk and provide the necessary inputs. As will be explained in the next series of posts, there are three key inputs that are needed: future expected return (or simply expected return), variance of asset returns, and correlation (or covariance) of asset returns.
There are [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loan-advice.org/inputs-required/</link>
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