As we took the Global Energy and Commodities Investing Forum around the country, one of the hot discussion points was total return investing and portfolio construction.

As we know, total return investing is almost the complete opposite to benchmark aware active investing - and since there are lots of proponents of that approach, it is important that both sides of the debate understand the key issues.

Total return investing may be defined as an approach which seeks to invest a clear part of the risk budget in a style that seeks to produce a defined outcome. This may be implemented via hedge funds, but pure hedge funds are limited to market ne...