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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]