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.

This book answers the questions: What is happening to American agriculture, and why? Steven C. Blank uses portfolio theory to analyze both macro- and microeconomic data that paints a clear picture of the trends in agriculture, and explains why these trends are consistent with market evolution and global economic development. He clarifies agriculture's specific role in economic development with a focus on the current and future globalizing commodity markets.The book features empirical research that demonstrates the link between farm-level investment decisions and regional and national economic trends. It shows how the dynamic environment of industrialization and globalization of agriculture is part of a continuing development that is driven by technological innovation. This all points to a future with a very different agricultural production sector and some extremely important policy choices that will face the entire country.

Historical and recent developments at international ?nancial markets show that it is easy to loose money, while it is dif?cult to predict future developments and op- mize decision-making towards maximizing returns and minimizing risk. One of the reasons of our inability to make reliable predictions and to make optimal decisions is the growing complexity of the global economy. This is especially true for the f- eign exchange market (FX market) which is considered as one of the largest and most liquid ?nancial markets. Its grade of ef?ciencyand its complexityis one of the starting points of this volume. From the high complexity of the FX market, Christian Ullrich deduces the - cessity to use tools from machine learning and arti?cial intelligence, e.g., support vector machines, and to combine such methods with sophisticated ?nancial mod- ing techniques. The suitability of this combination of ideas is demonstrated by an empirical study and by simulation. I am pleased to introduce this book to its - dience, hoping that it will provide the reader with interesting ideas to support the understanding of FX markets and to help to improve risk management in dif?cult times. Moreover, I hope that its publication will stimulate further research to contribute to the solution of the many open questions in this area.