From an investment practitioner's point of view any behavioural finance based investment approach suffers from its unreliability, i.e. even a well-researched 'assumption' about the price behaviour of specific stocks, classes of stocks, etc. repeatedly demonstrates that it sometimes refuses to obey to the 'rules' once filtered out by intensive research. This fact is responsible for the oftentimes unconvincing investment returns when compared to those from investing in indices. This paper is targeting this 'problem' by introducing a new theory broadening and complementing the theoretical basis of the behavioural finance camp currently built around two heuristics of human behaviour. This 'new' theory sheds light on a unique human capability honed by human biological evolution. This unique capability is responsible for the specific kind of human (economic) behaviour and all its far-reaching repercussions. As a less surprising outcome the very basic underlying assumption of the 'efficient market camp' turns out to be hypothetical, at best. However, the new theory also provides an explanation for the confined degree of reliability of any currently applied active behavioural assumptions' based investment approach. This puzzle can only be resolved by drawing on evolutionary biology again which, by means of its conclusion, should make investors to selectively direct their investments along a very clear-cut pattern to be derived in that paper. Following this pattern should provide for an improved perfomance of behavioural finance based active investment approaches.

The End of Modern Portfolio Theory Behavioral Investment Management proves what many have been thinking since the global economic downturn: Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is no longer a viable portfolio management strategy. Inherently flawed and based largely on ideology, MPT can not be relied upon in modern markets. Behavioral Investment Management offers a new approach-one addresses certain realities that MPT ignores, including the fact that emotions play a major role in investing. The authors lay out new standards reflecting behavioral finance and dynamic asset allocation, then explain how to apply these standards to your current portfolio construction efforts. They explain how to move away from the idealized, black-and-white world of MPT and into the real world of investing--placing heavy emphasis on the importance of mastering emotions. Behavioral Investment Management provides a portfolio-management standard for an investing world in disarray. PART 1- The Current Paradigm: MPT (Modern Portfolio Theory); Chapter 1: Modern Portfolio Theory as it Stands; Chapter 2: Challenges to MPT: Theoretical-the assumptions are not thus; Chapter 3: Challenges to MPT: Empirical-the world is not thus; Chapter 4: Challenges to MPT: Behavioural-people are not thus; Chapter 5: Describing the Overall Framework: Investors and Investments; PART 2- Amending MPT: Getting to BMPT; Chapter 1:Investors-The Rational Investor; Chapter 2: Investments-Extracting Value from the long-term; Chapter 3: Investments-Extracting Value from the short-term; Chapter 4: bringing it together, the new BMPT paradigm; PART 3- Emotional Insurance: Sticking with the Journey; Chapter 1: Investors- the emotional investor; Chapter 2: Investments- Constraining the rational portfolio; PART 4- Practical Implications; Chapter 1: The BMPT and Wealth Management; Chapter 2: The BMPT and the Pension Industry; Chapter 3: The BMPT and Asset Managemen

A groundbreaking framework for improving portfolio performance that goes beyond traditional analytics, offering new ways to understand investment skills, process, and behaviors. Portfolio management is a tough business. Each day, managers face the challenges of an ever-changing and unforgiving market, where strategies and processes that worked yesterday may not work today, or tomorrow. The usual advice for improving portfolio performance—refining your strategy, staying within your style, doing better research, trading more efficiently—is important, but doesn't seem to affect outcomes sufficiently. This book, by an experienced advisor to institutional money managers, goes beyond conventional thinking to offer a new analytic framework that enables investors to improve their performance confidently, deliberately, and simply, by applying the principles of behavioral finance. W. Edwards Deming observed that you can't improve what you don't measure. Active portfolio management lacks methods for measuring key inputs to management success like skills, process, and behavioral tendencies. Michael Ervolini offers a conceptually straightforward and well-tested framework that does just that, with evidence of how it helps managers enhance self-awareness and become better investors. In a series of short, accessible chapters, Ervolini investigates a range of topics from psychology and neuroscience, describing their relevance to the challenges of portfolio management. Finally, Ervolini offers seven ideas for improving. These range from maintaining an investment diary to performing rudimentary calculations that quantify basic skills; each idea, or “project,” helps managers gain a deeper understanding of their strengths and shortcomings and how to use this knowledge to improve investment performance.

The investment industry is on the cusp of a major shift, from Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to Behavioral Finance, with Behavioral Portfolio Management (BMP) the next step in this transition. BPM focuses on how to harness the price distortions that are driven by emotional crowds and use this to create superior portfolios. Once markets and investing are viewed through the lens of behavior, and portfolios are constructed on this basis, investable opportunities become readily apparent. Mastering your emotions is critical to the process and the insights provided by Tom Howard put investors on the path to achieving this. Forty years of Behavioral Science research presents a clear picture of how individuals make decisions; there are few signs of rationality. Indeed, emotional investors sabotage their own efforts in building long-horizon wealth. When this is combined with the misconception that active management is unable to generate superior returns, the typical emotional investor leaves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on the table during their investment lifetimes. Howard moves on to show how industry practice, with its use of the style grid, standard deviation, correlation, maximum drawdown and the Sharpe ratio, has entrenched emotion within investing. The result is that investors construct underperforming, bubble-wrapped portfolios. So if an investor masters their own emotions, they still must challenge the emotionally-based conventional wisdom pervasive throughout the industry. Tom Howard explains how to do this. Attention is then given to measureable and persistent behavioral factors. These provide investors with a new source of information that has the potential to transform how they think about portfolio management and dramatically improve performance. Behavioral factors can be used to select the best stocks, the best active managers, and the best markets in which to invest. Once the transition to behavioral finance is made, the emotional measures of MPT will quickly be forgotten and replaced with rational concepts that allow investors to successfully build long-horizon wealth. If you take portfolio construction seriously, it is essential that you make the next step forward towards Behavioral Portfolio Management.

"Pompian is handing you the magic book, the one that reveals your behavioral flaws and shows you how to avoid them. The tricks to success are here. Read and do not stop until you are one of very few magicians." —Arnold S. Wood, President and Chief Executive Officer, Martingale Asset Management Fear and greed drive markets, as well as good and bad investment decision-making. In Behavioral Finance and Wealth Management, financial expert Michael Pompian shows you, whether you're an investor or a financial advisor, how to make better investment decisions by employing behavioral finance research. Pompian takes a practical approach to the science of behavioral finance and puts it to use in the real world. He reveals 20 of the most prominent individual investor biases and helps you properly modify your asset allocation decisions based on the latest research on behavioral anomalies of individual investors.

Emotional behavior and biases run throughout financial markets. This is the diagnosis of behavioral finance. But it is not enough to know that investors make biased decisions. What do we do about it? How do we move beyond diagnosis, to prescription? In this groundbreaking new book, investing and behavioural finance experts Thomas Howard and Jason A. Voss plug this void and show the new way ahead for investment managers and advisors. Return of the Active Manager provides a set of tools for investment professionals to overcome and take advantage of behavioral biases. Across seven compelling chapters, Return of the Active Manager details actionable advice on topics such as behaviourally-enhanced fundamental analysis, active equity fund evaluation and selection, harnessing big data, and investment firm structure. You learn how to exploit behavioural price distortions, how to recognise and avoid behavioural biases (in both yourself and clients), how to extract behavioral insights from the executives of prospective investments, and how manager behaviour can be used to predict future fund performance. An indispensable tool, Return of the Active Manager rationalises the financial markets and prescribes actionable strategies that build on the lessons of behavioural finance.

The science behind creating portfolios that adapt to market changes “After ten years of poor stock market returns and yet great bond and gold returns, there is a real thirst for an all-weather portfolio in a high-risk period. Dick Stoken builds that diversified portfolio and also introduces some timing methods to improve returns and lower risks. This is a very timely and useful book.” —Ned Davis, Senior Investment Strategist, Ned Davis Research, Inc. “Dick Stoken’s Survival of the Fittest for Investors is a masterful and unique dissection of what makes the market tick. It represents an indispensable and brand-new approach for the serious investor. A must on every investor’s reading list.” —Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus, CME Group “I selected Stoken’s Strategic Investment Timing as the Best Investment Book of the Year in the 1985 Stock Trader’s Almanac; Survival of the Fittest for Investors will be a leading contender for Best Investment Book of the Year in the upcoming 2013 edition.” —Yale Hirsch, founder, Stock Trader’s Almanac About the Book: Just as the animal kingdom is composed of many species, today’s financial systems are composed of a multitude of independent participants, all over the globe, all influencing the whole. Survival of the Fittest for Investors breaks down the science behind the behavior of these market participants to present a definitive system for building profitable portfolios based on the concept of natural selection. This advanced guide to the cutting-edge science of complex adaptive systems in financial markets tells you where to find and how to track the evolutionary instability underlying these markets. It shows how, with heightened insight and a powerful algorithm, you can survive and thrive in volatile markets by following the simple principles of evolution. Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Dick Stoken punches holes in the outdated, Newtonian cause-and-effect paradigm and helps you see financial markets from a Darwinian perspective, where they function as complex systems that have the ability to adapt. By using his state-of-the-art algorithm, Stoken demonstrates how you can use agent-based modeling to assess the actual way markets behave in order to maximize the upside of your asset allocation. Stoken shows that variation is the key to profitability by using three real-world portfolios, each balancing four major asset classes going back thirty-nine years. Each portfolio clearly demonstrates how to reap consistently impressive profits with lower-than-market risk—regardless of your investment style. Whether you take conservative, traditional, or leveraged positions, this book helps you create portfolios of equities, debt, gold, and real estate that have proven to beat the S&P 500 by up to 22.5 percent! After opening your eyes to the science of complex adaptive systems and the vitality of punctuated equilibrium, Survival of the Fittest for Investors helps you implement the know-how into nuts-and-bolts results by equipping you with such practical tools as: A 1-year/6-month algorithm for accurately simulating evolutionary fluctuations in markets A cutting-edge allocation strategy that takes advantage of our natural “herding” instinct Tips for recognizing and enduring “bubbles” Without Survival of the Fittest for Investors, the evolution of investing may leave your wealth behind.