Mar 10
The SPIVA report was released a few days ago and as I’ve mentioend before it is my favourite assessment of the success of fund managers because it takes into consideration survivorship bias…in other words, if you want to know who are the best fund managers over the last year, then you start with all fund …
Mar 04
Many financial planners recommend their clients follow a particular Strategic Asset Allocation that may be based on the output of the combination of a risk profile as well as matching the client’s needs. For example, a popular strategic asset allocation for a “balanced” portfolio may be along the lines of… Australian Shares 35% Global Shares …
Feb 20
A look at the average returns of bonds over the last 30 years does not suggest that equity returns have really been worth the risk. Table 1 shows the returns on Australian Bonds (Aust Comm Bank All Series/All Maturities) versus the accumulated return of the Australian sharemarket (S&P/ASX 200 TR) and whilst equities have the better performance …
Jan 25
Lonsec have a reasonable investment strategy paper released today (subscription required) suggesting one of the best ways of managing equity market risk is to use variable beta managers. A variable beta manager is a manager who has the ability to significantly change their exposure to the market depending on their view. So if a variable …
Jan 19
I read the following comment this morning in the Money Management daily enews…Market Neutral Funds Underrated: Zenith… There is demonstrable portfolio improvement to be had from allocating to market neutral strategies as part of the equity allocation… That says to me that if you want to improve your equities part of the portfolio then replace …
Jan 14
Page 31 of the Australian Financial Review (AFR) today has an article suggesting “that the traditional buy-hold approach to owning shares is dead”…full text, with subscription can be found here. The article’s stated reason for buy-hold is that “in the long run, markets always go up and will provide investors with a good return on …
Nov 07
Last Friday I attended a day long program with around 80 researchers, financial advisers, and other financial professionals as part of a 5 day portfolio construction program run by Graham Rich over a 12 month period. Friday’s program was divided into three parts… Investment Fables Asset Allocation using Scenario Modelling Greece Each part went for …
Oct 29
A couple of weeks ago I did a post showing Fama French 3 Factor analysis on some of the leading Australian Equities fund managers. The analysis covered returns from June 2003 to September 2011 so it obviously covered a mixture of markets…bull bear and sideways. I just completed the same analysis but this time I …
Oct 14
Its been a little while since I wrote anything on managed fnds. Yesterday I attended a series of presentations at Griffith University whereby undergrad students presented results of their previous few months working in financial services. Some of the results were very interesting including how many global fund managers demonstrated a different investment style than …