Better Than Alpha Three Steps To Capturing Excess Returns In A Changing World

A powerful new approach for giving up the ghost of alpha—and building an investing portfolio that meets your objectives The concept of beating markets is just a lot of hype. Successful investors don’t find “alpha,” they find value―and that’s what this book helps you do. Better Than Alpha provides the perspective, insights, and tools you need to retrain your focus away from searching for alpha and toward actions that produce superior investment outcomes. Chris Schelling explains why strategies based on “beating the markets” are doomed to failure and provides a simple three-step framework for making better investment decisions: Behavior (smart thinking), Process (smart habits), Organization (smart governance). He explains why the search for alpha is destined to fail, the major role behavioral finance plays in so much wasted time, effort, and money, and, most important, how to avoid common mistakes and maximize your efforts. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of what drives investment returns, how superstar investment managers generated excess returns in the past, and why strategies that worked in the past don’t necessarily make sense today. Whether you’re responsible for generating revenue streams for pensions, endowments, or foundations; mitigating insurance losses; serving as an investment consultant; or any other institutional-level investing, Better Than Alpha walks you through the process of minimizing the impacts of behavioral biases and making decisions that create a higher probability of meeting your objectives―whatever they may be.

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.

This book explores the swiftly emerging nexus between sustainability, finance, and technology. Leading practitioners and academic thought leaders reflect on the ways in which technology and digitalization shape how sustainable finance professionals address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Together, the contributors identify three spheres in which technology shapes how investors make sense of such issues: ESG and technology: finance professionals need to know about how technological innovations, such as chemical recycling for plastics, in the real economy shape firms’ ESG performance; ESG through technology: technological developments, such as AI and blockchain, can enable finance professionals to offer more fine-grained ESG analyses; and ESG as technology: the ESG agenda itself is influenced by technological developments that are not well understood by practitioners (e.g., data mining for Bitcoin creating significant emissions). Using practically relevant examples and recent insights from people working in the field, the book explores the linkages between sustainability, technology, and finance in different contexts and shows how practitioners can accelerate needed change processes. This book primarily addresses practitioners in companies and investment firms as well as students enrolled in executive education and MBA programs.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The market capitalization of publicly traded US stocks is roughly $35 trillion. It is a marketplace dominated by giant investment management firms such as BlackRock, with $7. 4 trillion in assets under management, and the Vanguard Group, with $5. 3 trillion. #2 The Investment Company of America, which was founded by JBL in 1934, has averaged a 12. 0% annual net return since its inception. It has outperformed the SP 500 by 52 percent, and it has done even better in down years. #3 The Lovelace family has built the Capital Group into a great company, but it is certainly not the only one that has relied on valuation-based processes to generate excess returns over long periods of time. #4 The factors that define stock markets today were discovered by Professor Fama and his colleague Kenneth French, who introduced three common factors that were predictive of stock returns along with two for bonds.

Alternative Investments: A Primer for Investment Professionals provides an overview of alternative investments for institutional asset allocators and other overseers of portfolios containing both traditional and alternative assets. It is designed for those with substantial experience regarding traditional investments in stocks and bonds but limited familiarity regarding alternative assets, alternative strategies, and alternative portfolio management. The primer categorizes alternative assets into four groups: hedge funds, real assets, private equity, and structured products/derivatives. Real assets include vacant land, farmland, timber, infrastructure, intellectual property, commodities, and private real estate. For each group, the primer provides essential information about the characteristics, challenges, and purposes of these institutional-quality alternative assets in the context of a well-diversified institutional portfolio. Other topics addressed by this primer include tail risk, due diligence of the investment process and operations, measurement and management of risks and returns, setting return expectations, and portfolio construction. The primer concludes with a chapter on the case for investing in alternatives.

Manager selection is a critical step in implementing any investment program. Investors hire portfolio managers to act as their agents, and portfolio managers are then expected to perform to the best of their abilities and in the investors' best interests. Investors must practice due diligence when selecting portfolio managers. They need to not only identify skillful managers, but also determine the appropriate weights to assign to those managers. This book is designed to help investors improve their ability to select managers. Achieving this goal includes reviewing techniques for hiring active, indexed, and alternative managers; highlighting strategies for setting portfolio manager weights and monitoring current managers; and considering the value of quantitative and qualitative methods for successful manager selection.

The guide for investors who want a better understanding of investment strategies that have stood the test of time This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Investment Philosophies covers different investment philosophies and reveal the beliefs that underlie each one, the evidence on whether the strategies that arise from the philosophy actually produce results, and what an investor needs to bring to the table to make the philosophy work. The book covers a wealth of strategies including indexing, passive and activist value investing, growth investing, chart/technical analysis, market timing, arbitrage, and many more investment philosophies. Presents the tools needed to understand portfolio management and the variety of strategies available to achieve investment success Explores the process of creating and managing a portfolio Shows readers how to profit like successful value growth index investors Aswath Damodaran is a well-known academic and practitioner in finance who is an expert on different approaches to valuation and investment This vital resource examines various investing philosophies and provides you with helpful online resources and tools to fully investigate each investment philosophy and assess whether it is a philosophy that is appropriate for you.