The author presents the theory of portfolio choice from a new perspective, recommending decision rules that have advantages over those currently used in theory and practice. Portfolio choice theory relies on expected values. Goodall argues that this dependence has a historical basis and argues that current decision rules are inadequate for most portfolio choice situations. Drawing on econometric solutions proposed for the problem of forecasting outcomes of a chance experiment, the author defines adequacy criteria, and proposes adequate decision rules for a variety of situations. Goodall's theory combines the problems of prediction and choice, and formulates solutions based on cost functions that fit the underlying decision situation.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Portfolio Decision Analysis: Improved Methods for Resource Allocation provides an extensive, up-to-date coverage of decision analytic methods which help firms and public organizations allocate resources to 'lumpy' investment opportunities while explicitly recognizing relevant financial and non-financial evaluation criteria and the presence of alternative investment opportunities. In particular, it discusses the evolution of these methods, presents new methodological advances and illustrates their use across several application domains. The book offers a many-faceted treatment of portfolio decision analysis (PDA). Among other things, it (i) synthesizes the state-of-play in PDA, (ii) describes novel methodologies, (iii) fosters the deployment of these methodologies, and (iv) contributes to the strengthening of research on PDA. Portfolio problems are widely regarded as the single most important application context of decision analysis, and, with its extensive and unique coverage of these problems, this book is a much-needed addition to the literature. The book also presents innovative treatments of new methodological approaches and their uses in applications. The intended audience consists of practitioners and researchers who wish to gain a good understanding of portfolio decision analysis and insights into how PDA methods can be leveraged in different application contexts. The book can also be employed in courses at the post-graduate level.

Finance researchers and asset management practitioners put a lot of effort into the question of optimal asset allocation. With this respect, a lot of research has been conducted on portfolio decision making as well as quantitative modeling and prediction models. This study brings together three fields of research, which are usually analyzed in an isolated manner in the literature: - Predictability of asset returns and their covariance matrix - Optimal portfolio decision making - Nonlinear modeling, performed by artificial neural networks, and their impact on predictions as well as optimal portfolio construction Including predictability in asset allocation is the focus of this work and it pays special attention to issues related to nonlinearities. The contribution of this study to the portfolio choice literature is twofold. First, motivated by the evidence of linear predictability, the impact of nonlinear predictions on portfolio performances is analyzed. Predictions are empirically performed for an investor who invests in equities (represented by the DAX index), bonds (represented by the REXP index) and a risk-free rate. Second, a solution to the dynamic programming problem for intertemporal portfolio choice is presented. The method is based on functional approximations of the investor's value function with artificial neural networks. The method is easily capable of handling multiple state variables. Hence, the effect of adding predictive parameters to the state space is the focus of analysis as well as the impacts of estimation biases and the view of a Bayesian investor on intertemporal portfolio choice. One important empirical result shows that residual correlation among state variables have an impact on intertemporal portfolio decision making.

In the modern science and technology there are some research directions and ch- lenges which are at the forefront of world wide research activities because of their relevance. This relevance may be related to different aspects. First, from a point of view of researchers it can be implied by just an analytic or algorithmic difficulty in the solution of problems within an area. From a broader perspective, this re- vance can be related to how important problems and challenges in a particular area are to society, corporate or national competitiveness, etc. Needless to say that the latter, more global challenges are probably more decisive a driving force for s- ence seen from a global perspective. One of such “meta-challenges” in the present world is that of intelligent s- tems. For a long time it has been obvious that the complexity of our world and the speed of changes we face in virtually all processes that have impact on our life imply a need to automate many tasks and processes that have been so far limited to human beings because they require some sort of intelligence.