Asset Allocation: Balancing Financial Risk, Second Edition, is the revised edition of the best-selling reference book on asset allocation with completely updated facts and figures. Inside you'll find a comprehensive review of the capital market theory behind asset allocation, plus step-by-step guidelines for designing and implementing appropriate asset allocation strategies. This is essential reading for anyone who advises individuals and/or institutional clients regarding the investment of money.

The conventional portfolio is prone to frequent and potentially devastating losses because it is NOT balanced to different economic outcomes. In contrast, a truly balanced portfolio can help investors reduce risk and more reliably achieve their objectives. This simple fact would surprise most investors, from beginners to professionals. Investment consultant Alex Shahidi puts his 15 years of experience advising the most sophisticated investors in the world and managing multi-billion dollar portfolios to work in this important resource for investors. You will better understand why nearly every portfolio is poorly balanced and how to view the crucial asset allocation decision from a deeper, more thoughtful perspective. The concepts presented are simple, intuitive and easy to implement for every investor. Author Alex Shahidi will walk you through the logic behind the balanced portfolio framework and provide step-by-step instructions on how to build a truly balanced portfolio. No book has ever been written that discusses asset allocation in this light. Provides insights from a top-ranked investment consultant using strategies from the industry’s brightest minds Proposes a balanced asset allocation that can achieve stable returns through various economic climates Introduces sophisticated concepts in very simple terms For those who want to better manage their investment portfolio and seek a more advanced approach to building a balanced portfolio, Balanced Asset Allocation: How to Profit in Any Economic Climate provides an in-depth treatment of the topic that can be put to use immediately.

Time-Tested Techniques - Safe, Simple, and Proven Effective - for Building Your Own Investment Portfolio. "As its title suggest, Bill Bernstein's fine book honors the sensible principles of Benjamin Graham in the Intelligent Investor Bernstein's concepts are sound, his writing crystal clear, and his exposition orderly. Any reader who takes the time and effort to understand his approach to the crucial subject of asset allocation will surely be rewarded with enhanced long-term returns." - John C. Bogle, Founder and former Chief Executive Officer, The Vanguard Group President, Bogle Financial Markets Research Center Author, common Sense on Mutual Funds. "Bernstein has become a guru to a peculiarly '90s group: well-educated, Internet-powered people intent on investing well - and with minimal 'help' from professional Wall Street." - Robert Barker, Columnist, BusinessWeek. "I go home and tell my wife sometimes, 'I wonder if [Bernstein] doesn't know more than me.' It's humbling." - John Rekenthaler, Research Chief, Morningstar Inc. William Bernstein is an unlikely financial hero. A practicing neurologist, he used his self-taught investment knowledge and research to build one of today's most respected investor's websites. Now, let his plain-spoken The Intelligent Asset Allocator show you how to use the time-honored techniques of asset allocation to build your own pathway to financial security - one that is easy-to-understand, easier-to-apply, and supported by 75 years of solid history and wealth-building results.

Since the formalization of asset allocation in 1952 with the publication of Portfolio Selection by Harry Markowitz, there have been great strides made to enhance the application of this groundbreaking theory. However, progress has been uneven. It has been punctuated with instances of misleading research, which has contributed to the stubborn persistence of certain fallacies about asset allocation. A Practitioner's Guide to Asset Allocation fills a void in the literature by offering a hands-on resource that describes the many important innovations that address key challenges to asset allocation and dispels common fallacies about asset allocation. The authors cover the fundamentals of asset allocation, including a discussion of the attributes that qualify a group of securities as an asset class and a detailed description of the conventional application of mean-variance analysis to asset allocation.. The authors review a number of common fallacies about asset allocation and dispel these misconceptions with logic or hard evidence. The fallacies debunked include such notions as: asset allocation determines more than 90% of investment performance; time diversifies risk; optimization is hypersensitive to estimation error; factors provide greater diversification than assets and are more effective at reducing noise; and that equally weighted portfolios perform more reliably out of sample than optimized portfolios. A Practitioner's Guide to Asset Allocation also explores the innovations that address key challenges to asset allocation and presents an alternative optimization procedure to address the idea that some investors have complex preferences and returns may not be elliptically distributed. Among the challenges highlighted, the authors explain how to overcome inefficiencies that result from constraints by expanding the optimization objective function to incorporate absolute and relative goals simultaneously. The text also explores the challenge of currency risk, describes how to use shadow assets and liabilities to unify liquidity with expected return and risk, and shows how to evaluate alternative asset mixes by assessing exposure to loss throughout the investment horizon based on regime-dependent risk. This practical text contains an illustrative example of asset allocation which is used to demonstrate the impact of the innovations described throughout the book. In addition, the book includes supplemental material that summarizes the key takeaways and includes information on relevant statistical and theoretical concepts, as well as a comprehensive glossary of terms.

The Definitive Guide to Strategic Asset Allocation Uniting theory and practice--the art and science of asset allocation Investors long to beat the market, and money managers accept that as their mandate. The sad reality is that most money managers underperform the market, and individual investors do even worse. Investors also face emotional challenges. The irrational exuberance of the 1990s, for instance, can as easily derail a sensible investment strategy as the market panic accompanying the Global Financial Crisis. Since Roger Gibson wrote the first edition of this book over 25 years ago, his multiple-asset class investment approach has given investors a disciplined strategy for mitigating risks and realizing their financial goals through widely varying market environments. Grounded in the principles of modern portfolio theory, this fifth edition of his investing classic explains how and why asset allocation works. Gibson demonstrates how adding new asset classes to a portfolio improves its risk-adjusted returns and how strategic asset allocation uses, rather than fights, the forces of the capital markets to achieve financial success. New topics in this edition include: The success of multiple-asset-class investing during the stock market's "lost decade" Methods for forecasting long-term asset class returns and the limitations of prediction The dangers of market timing and the challenges involved in tactical asset allocation strategies--with insights from the field of behavioral finance Observations from the Global SIDONI Financial Crisis of 2008 and what it means for the multiple-asset-class investor With more than three decades of experience managing clients' portfolios and expectations, Gibson underscores the importance of identifying and working through the emotional and psychological traps that impede investment success. Join the quarter-century trend of Asset Allocation providing investors with a sound approach to financial well-being.

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.

An authoritative resource for the wealth management industry that bridges the gap between modern perspectives on asset allocation and practical implementation An advanced yet practical dive into the world of asset allocation, Modern Asset Allocation for Wealth Management provides the knowledge financial advisors and their robo-advisor counterparts need to reclaim ownership of the asset allocation component of their fiduciary responsibility. Wealth management practitioners are commonly taught the traditional mean-variance approach in CFA and similar curricula, a method with increasingly limited applicability given the evolution of investment products and our understanding of real-world client preferences. Additionally, financial advisors and researchers typically receive little to no training on how to implement a robust asset allocation framework, a conceptually simple yet practically very challenging task. This timely book offers professional wealth managers and researchers an up-to-date and implementable toolset for managing client portfolios. The information presented in this book far exceeds the basic models and heuristics most commonly used today, presenting advances in asset allocation that have been isolated to academic and institutional portfolio management settings until now, while simultaneously providing a clear framework that advisors can immediately deploy. This rigorous manuscript covers all aspects of creating client portfolios: setting client risk preferences, deciding which assets to include in the portfolio mix, forecasting future asset performance, and running an optimization to set a final allocation. An important resource for all wealth management fiduciaries, this book enables readers to: Implement a rigorous yet streamlined asset allocation framework that they can stand behind with conviction Deploy both neo-classical and behavioral elements of client preferences to more accurately establish a client risk profile Incorporate client financial goals into the asset allocation process systematically and precisely with a simple balance sheet model Create a systematic framework for justifying which assets should be included in client portfolios Build capital market assumptions from historical data via a statistically sound and intuitive process Run optimization methods that respect complex client preferences and real-world asset characteristics Modern Asset Allocation for Wealth Management is ideal for practicing financial advisors and researchers in both traditional and robo-advisor settings, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on asset allocation.