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.

In Asymmetric Returns, financial expert Alexander Ineichen elevates the critical discussion about alpha versus beta and absolute returns versus relative returns. He argues that controlling downside volatility is a key element in asset management if sustainable positive compounding of capital and financial survival are major objectives. Achieving sustainable positive absolute returns are the result of taking and managing risk wisely, that is, an active risk management process where risk is defined in absolute terms and changes in the market place are accounted for. The result of an active risk management process-when successful-is an asymmetric return profile, that is, more and higher returns on the upside and fewer and lower returns on the downside. Ineichen claims that achieving Asymmetric Returns is the future of active asset management. Alexander M. Ineichen, CFA, CAIA, is Managing Director and Senior Investment Officer for the Alternative Investment Solutions team, a key provider within Alternative and Quantitative Investments, itself a business within UBS Global Asset Management. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association (CAIAA). Ineichen is the author of the two UBS research publications In Search of Alpha—Investing in Hedge Funds (October 2000) and The Search for Alpha Continues—Do Fund of Hedge Funds Add Value? (September 2001). As of 2006 these two reports were the most often printed research papers in the documented history of UBS. He is also author of the widely popular Absolute Returns—The Risk and Opportunities of Hedge Fund Investing, also published by John Wiley & Sons.

"This new edition of Active Portfolio Management continues the standard of excellence established in the first edition, with new and clear insights to help investment professionals." -William E. Jacques, Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Martingale Asset Management. "Active Portfolio Management offers investors an opportunity to better understand the balance between manager skill and portfolio risk. Both fundamental and quantitative investment managers will benefit from studying this updated edition by Grinold and Kahn." -Scott Stewart, Portfolio Manager, Fidelity Select Equity ® Discipline Co-Manager, Fidelity Freedom ® Funds. "This Second edition will not remain on the shelf, but will be continually referenced by both novice and expert. There is a substantial expansion in both depth and breadth on the original. It clearly and concisely explains all aspects of the foundations and the latest thinking in active portfolio management." -Eric N. Remole, Managing Director, Head of Global Structured Equity, Credit Suisse Asset Management. Mathematically rigorous and meticulously organized, Active Portfolio Management broke new ground when it first became available to investment managers in 1994. By outlining an innovative process to uncover raw signals of asset returns, develop them into refined forecasts, then use those forecasts to construct portfolios of exceptional return and minimal risk, i.e., portfolios that consistently beat the market, this hallmark book helped thousands of investment managers. Active Portfolio Management, Second Edition, now sets the bar even higher. Like its predecessor, this volume details how to apply economics, econometrics, and operations research to solving practical investment problems, and uncovering superior profit opportunities. It outlines an active management framework that begins with a benchmark portfolio, then defines exceptional returns as they relate to that benchmark. Beyond the comprehensive treatment of the active management process covered previously, this new edition expands to cover asset allocation, long/short investing, information horizons, and other topics relevant today. It revisits a number of discussions from the first edition, shedding new light on some of today's most pressing issues, including risk, dispersion, market impact, and performance analysis, while providing empirical evidence where appropriate. The result is an updated, comprehensive set of strategic concepts and rules of thumb for guiding the process of-and increasing the profits from-active investment management.

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.

Active 130/30 Extensions is the newest wave of disciplined investment strategies that involves asymmetric decision-making on long/short portfolio decisions, concentrated investment risk-taking in contrast to diversification, systematic portfolio risk management, and flexibility in portfolio design. This strategy is the building block for a number of 130/30 and 120/20 investment strategies offered to institutional and sophisticated high net worth individual investors who want to manage their portfolios actively and aggressively to outperform the market.

Winning at Active Management conducts an in-depth examination of crucial issues facing the investment management industry, and will be a valuable resource for asset managers, institutional consultants, managers of pension and endowment funds, and advisers to individual investors. Bill Priest, Steve Bleiberg and Mike Welhoelter all experienced investment professionals, consider the challenges of managing portfolios through complex markets, as well as managing the cultural and technological complexities of the investment business. The book’s initial section highlights the importance of culture within an investment firm – the characteristics of strong cultures, the imperatives of communication and support, and suggestions for leading firms through times of both adversity and prosperity. It continues with a thorough discussion of active portfolio management for equities. The ongoing debate over active versus passive management is reviewed in detail, drawing on both financial theory and real-world investing results. The book also contrasts traditional methods of portfolio management, based on accounting metrics and price-earnings ratios, with Epoch Investment Partners’ philosophy of investing on free cash flow and appropriate capital allocation. Winning at Active Management closes with an inquiry into the crucial and growing role of technology in investing. The authors assert that the most effective portfolio strategies result from neither pure fundamental nor quantitative methods, but instead from thoughtful combinations of analyst and portfolio manager experience and skill with the speed and breadth of quantitative analysis. The authors illustrate the point with an example of an innovative Epoch equity strategy based on economic logic and judgment, but enabled by information technology. Winning at Active Management also offers important insights into selecting active managers – the market cycle factors that have held back many managers’ performance in recent years, and the difficulty of identifying those firms that truly possess investment skill. Drawing on behavioral economic theory and empirical research, the book makes a convincing case that many active investment managers can and do generate returns superior to those of the broad market.

Efficiently Inefficient describes the key trading strategies used by hedge funds and demystifies the secret world of active investing. Leading financial economist Lasse Heje Pedersen combines the latest research with real-world examples and interviews with top hedge fund managers to show how certain trading strategies make money--and why they sometimes don't. Pedersen views markets as neither perfectly efficient nor completely inefficient. Rather, they are inefficient enough that money managers can be compensated for their costs through the profits of their trading strategies and efficient enough that the profits after costs do not encourage additional active investing. Understanding how to trade in this efficiently inefficient market provides a new, engaging way to learn finance. Pedersen analyzes how the market price of stocks and bonds can differ from the model price, leading to new perspectives on the relationship between trading results and finance theory. He explores several different areas in depth--fundamental tools for investment management, equity strategies, macro strategies, and arbitrage strategies--and he looks at such diverse topics as portfolio choice, risk management, equity valuation, and yield curve logic. The book's strategies are illuminated further by interviews with leading hedge fund managers: Lee Ainslie, Cliff Asness, Jim Chanos, Ken Griffin, David Harding, John Paulson, Myron Scholes, and George Soros.