This survey of portfolio theory, from its modern origins through more sophisticated, “postmodern” incarnations, evaluates portfolio risk according to the first four moments of any statistical distribution: mean, variance, skewness, and excess kurtosis. In pursuit of financial models that more accurately describe abnormal markets and investor psychology, this book bifurcates beta on either side of mean returns. It then evaluates this traditional risk measure according to its relative volatility and correlation components. After specifying a four-moment capital asset pricing model, this book devotes special attention to measures of market risk in global banking regulation. Despite the deficiencies of modern portfolio theory, contemporary finance continues to rest on mean-variance optimization and the two-moment capital asset pricing model. The term postmodern portfolio theory captures many of the advances in financial learning since the original articulation of modern portfolio theory. A comprehensive approach to financial risk management must address all aspects of portfolio theory, from the beautiful symmetries of modern portfolio theory to the disturbing behavioral insights and the vastly expanded mathematical arsenal of the postmodern critique. Mastery of postmodern portfolio theory’s quantitative tools and behavioral insights holds the key to the efficient frontier of risk management.

Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters tells the story of how Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) revolutionized the investing world and the real economy, but is now showing its age. MPT has no mechanism to understand its impacts on the environmental, social and financial systems, nor any tools for investors to mitigate the havoc that systemic risks can wreck on their portfolios. It’s time for MPT to evolve. The authors propose a new imperative to improve finance’s ability to fulfil its twin main purposes: providing adequate returns to individuals and directing capital to where it is needed in the economy. They show how some of the largest investors in the world focus not on picking stocks, but on mitigating systemic risks, such as climate change and a lack of gender diversity, so as to improve the risk/return of the market as a whole, despite current theory saying that should be impossible. "Moving beyond MPT" recognizes the complex relations between investing and the systems on which capital markets rely, "Investing that matters" embraces MPT’s focus on diversification and risk adjusted return, but understands them in the context of the real economy and the total return needs of investors. Whether an investor, an MBA student, a Finance Professor or a sustainability professional, Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters is thought-provoking and relevant. Its bold critique shows how the real world already is moving beyond investing orthodoxy.

Get a practical and thoroughly updated look at investment and portfolio management from an accomplished veteran of the discipline In Modern Portfolio Management: Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory, investment executive and advisor Dr. Todd E. Petzel delivers a grounded and insightful exploration of developments in finance since the advent of Modern Portfolio Theory. You’ll find the tools and concepts you need to evaluate new products and portfolios and identify practical issues in areas like operations, decision-making, and regulation. In this book, you’ll also: Discover why Modern Portfolio Theory is at odds with developments in the field of Behavioral Finance Examine the never-ending argument between passive and active management and learn to set long-term goals and objectives Find investor perspectives on perennial issues like corporate governance, manager turnover, fraud risks, and ESG investing Perfect for institutional and individual investors, investment committee members, and fiduciaries responsible for portfolio construction and oversight, Modern Portfolio Management is also a must-read for fund and portfolio managers who seek to better understand their investors.

In recent years portfolio optimization and construction methodologies have become an increasingly critical ingredient of asset and fund management, while at the same time portfolio risk assessment has become an essential ingredient in risk management. This trend will only accelerate in the coming years. This practical handbook fills the gap between current university instruction and current industry practice. It provides a comprehensive computationally-oriented treatment of modern portfolio optimization and construction methods using the powerful NUOPT for S-PLUS optimizer.

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.

Quantitative methods have revolutionized the area of trading, regulation, risk management, portfolio construction, asset pricing and treasury activities, and governmental activity such as central banking to name but some of the applications. Downside-risk, as a quantitative method, is an accurate measurement of investment risk, because it captures the risk of not accomplishing the investor's goal. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' demonstrates how downside-risk can produce better results in performance measurement and asset allocation than variance modelling. Theory, as well as the practical issues involved in its implementation, is covered and the arguments put forward emphatically show the superiority of downside risk models to variance models in terms of risk measurement and decision making. Variance considers all uncertainty to be risky. Downside-risk only considers returns below that needed to accomplish the investor's goal, to be risky. Risk is one of the biggest issues facing the financial markets today. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' outlines the major issues for Investment Managers and focuses on "downside-risk" as a key activity in managing risk in investment/portfolio management. Managing risk is now THE paramount topic within the financial sector and recurring losses through the 1990s has shocked financial institutions into placing much greater emphasis on risk management and control. Free Software Enclosed To help you implement the knowledge you will gain from reading this book, a CD is enclosed that contains free software programs that were previously only available to institutional investors under special licensing agreement to The pension Research Institute. This is our contribution to the advancement of professionalism in portfolio management. The Forsey-Sortino model is an executable program that: 1. Runs on any PC without the need of any additional software. 2. Uses the bootstrap procedure developed by Dr. Bradley Effron at Stanford University to uncover what could have happened, instead of relying only on what did happen in the past. This is the best procedure we know of for describing the nature of uncertainty in financial markets. 3. Fits a three parameter lognormal distribution to the bootstrapped data to allow downside risk to be calculated from a continuous distribution. This improves the efficacy of the downside risk estimates. 4. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from monthly returns on any portfolio manager. 5. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from any user defined distribution. Forsey-Sortino Source Code: 1. The source code, written in Visual Basic 5.0, is provided for institutional investors who want to add these calculations to their existing financial services. 2. No royalties are required for this source code, providing institutions inform clients of the source of these calculations. A growing number of services are now calculating downside risk in a manner that we are not comfortable with. Therefore, we want investors to know when downside risk and upside potential are calculated in accordance with the methodology described in this book. Riddles Spreadsheet: 1. Neil Riddles, former Senior Vice President and Director of Performance Analysis at Templeton Global Advisors, now COO at Hansberger Global Advisors Inc., offers a free spreadsheet in excel format. 2. The spreadsheet calculates downside risk and upside potential relative to the returns on an index Brings together a range of relevant material, not currently available in a single volume source. Provides practical information on how financial organisations can use downside risk techniques and technological developments to effectively manage risk in their portfolio management. Provides a rigorous theoretical underpinning for the use of downside risk techniques. This is important for the long-run acceptance of the methodology, since such arguments justify consultant's recommendations to pension funds and other plan sponsors.

The book is an in-depth review of the theory and empirics of the demand for money and other financial assets. The different theoretical approaches to the portfolio choice problem are described, together with an up-to-date survey of the results obtained from empirical studies of asset choice behaviour. Both single-equation studies and the more complete multi-asset portfolio models, are analysed.