Economics In Asset Management

Asset management can be defined as the selection and maintenance over time of listed and unlisted financial instruments, with the aim of obtaining the best possible return for a certain level of risk.Nowadays, the asset management industry is under pressure for various reasons, including reductions in margins, constant regulatory, macro-economic and political changes, and new business models such as robo-advice.This book aims to provide an overview of asset management by focusing on some of the main issues in the sector. It gathers contributions on the system, strategies, opportunities and challenges.Chapter One highlights the importance of adopting an enterprise approach to the implementation of the asset management system, especially for large organizations. Chapter Two focuses on active and passive portfolio investment strategies. Active strategies aim to beat the market, while passive strategies support the efficient market theory by implying that a rational investor should buy the market as it is. Empirical evidence, in fact, supports both strategies. Chapter Three discusses a quantitative model applied to equity indexes corrected in order to consider currency risk. Chapter Four compares the portfolio characteristics and performance measures of social impact mutual funds, which implement different sustainable and responsible investment strategies. Chapter Five deals with impact investing, which is a niche within the Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) parameters. Chapter Six examines the asset allocation strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), which are state-owned investment funds or entities that have emerged as important investors in global equity. Finally, Chapter Seven provides background information on art investment and the combination of art and finance, with the focus on the demand for investment in art, art advisory models and art funds.

This book explores the current state of the art in quantitative investment management across seven key areas. Chapters by academics and practitioners working in leading investment management organizations bring together major theoretical and practical aspects of the field.

This book analyses investment management policies for institutional investors. It is composed of four parts. The first one analyses the various types of institutional investors, institutions which, with different objectives, professionally manage portfolios of financial and real assets on behalf of a wide variety of individuals. This part goes on with an in-depth analysis of the economic, technical and regulatory characteristics of the different types of investment funds and of other types of asset management products, which have a high rate of substitutability with investment funds and represent their natural competitors. The second part of the book identifies and investigates the stages of the investment portfolio management. Given the importance of strategic asset allocation in explaining the ex post performance of any type of investment portfolio, this part provides an in-depth analysis of asset allocation methods, illustrating the different theoretical and operational solutions available to institutional investors. The third part describes performance assessment, its breakdown and risk control, with an in-depth examination of performance evaluation techniques, returns-based style analysis approaches, and performance attribution models. Finally, the fourth part deals with the subject of diversification into alternative asset classes, identifying the common characteristics and their possible role within the framework of investment management policies. This part analyses hedge funds, private equity, real estate, commodities, and currency overlay techniques.

Long gone are the times when investors could make decisions based on intuition. Modern asset management draws on a wide-range of fields beyond financial theory: economics, financial accounting, econometrics/statistics, management science, operations research (optimization and Monte Carlo simulation), and more recently, data science (Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence). The challenge in writing an institutional asset management book is that when tools from these different fields are applied in an investment strategy or an analytical framework for valuing securities, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the fundamentals of these fields. Attempting to explain strategies and analytical concepts while also providing a primer on the tools from other fields is not the most effective way of describing the asset management process. Moreover, while an increasing number of investment models have been proposed in the asset management literature, there are challenges and issues in implementing these models. This book provides a description of the tools used in asset management as well as a more in-depth explanation of specialized topics and issues covered in the companion book, Fundamentals of Institutional Asset Management. The topics covered include the asset management business and its challenges, the basics of financial accounting, securitization technology, analytical tools (financial econometrics, Monte Carlo simulation, optimization models, and machine learning), alternative risk measures for asset allocation, securities finance, implementing quantitative research, quantitative equity strategies, transaction costs, multifactor models applied to equity and bond portfolio management, and backtesting methodologies. This pedagogic approach exposes the reader to the set of interdisciplinary tools that modern asset managers require in order to extract profits from data and processes.

Stocks and bonds? Real estate? Hedge funds? Private equity? If you think those are the things to focus on in building an investment portfolio, Andrew Ang has accumulated a body of research that will prove otherwise. In this book, Ang upends the conventional wisdom about asset allocation by showing that what matters aren't asset class labels but the bundles of overlapping risks they represent.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown in presence in asset management and has revolutionized the sector in many ways. It has improved portfolio management, trading, and risk management practices by increasing efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. In particular, AI techniques help construct portfolios based on more accurate risk and return forecasts and more complex constraints. Trading algorithms use AI to devise novel trading signals and execute trades with lower transaction costs. AI also improves risk modeling and forecasting by generating insights from new data sources. Finally, robo-advisors owe a large part of their success to AI techniques. Yet the use of AI can also create new risks and challenges, such as those resulting from model opacity, complexity, and reliance on data integrity.

This book covers the latest advances in the theory and practice of public investment management. It includes the most up-to-date developments in the implementation of public asset management – including multiple contributions on portfolio allocation in varying interest-rate and credit-risk environments. Other highlights include implementation, performance attribution and governance issues surrounding reserves management, portfolio construction techniques appropriate for public investors and an in-depth discussion of the challenges to achieving international diversification.

We have spent the last three decades engaged in a pointless and irrelevant debate about the relative merits of privatization or nationalization. We have been arguing about the wrong thing while sitting on a goldmine of assets. Don’t worry about who owns those assets, worry about whether they are managed effectively. Why does this matter? Because despite the Thatcher/ Reagan economic revolution, the largest pool of wealth in the world – a global total that is much larger than the world’s total pensions savings, and ten times the total of all the sovereign wealth funds on the planet – is still comprised of commercial assets that are held in public ownership. If professionally managed, they could generate an annual yield of 2.7 trillion dollars, more than current global spending on infrastructure: transport, power, water, and communications. Based on both economic research and hands-on experience from many countries, the authors argue that publicly owned commercial assets need to be taken out of the direct and distorting control of politicians and placed under professional management in a ‘National Wealth Fund’ or its local government equivalent. Such a move would trigger much-needed structural reforms in national economies, thus resurrect strained government finances, bolster ailing economic growth, and improve the fabric of democratic institutions. This radical, reforming book was named one of the "Books of the Year".by both the FT and The Economist.