In an industry saturated with greenwashing, woke-washing, whitewashing, and other appeals to our ethical sensibilities, moral courage is a critical virtue for upholding high ethical standards and building societal trust.

Private equity is promoted as providing returns several per cent higher than investing in public equity markets. These two papers reveal the true returns that private equity delivers to investors, identifying the real winners (the managers).

Ethical standards and codes serve as guiding principles for professionals - but the application is rarely straightforward. This paper reviews recent literature on moral judgment and the behavioural implications.

As the ideas and tools popularised under the banner of "nudge theory" have gained traction in the public and private sectors so, too, have ethical concerns regarding their use. Critics have long questioned the ethics of nudging.

Ethical blindness is one answer to the question "Why do good people do bad things?" Together, these two papers strongly reinforce the idea that ethical practice requires that we regularly hit the brakes and check our ethical blind spots.

At one extreme, the whole investment decision-making process could be turned over to AI - at the other, it can just be used in data collection. These two papers capture the challenges of integrating AI into funds management and financial advice processes.

The financial services industry has long embraced the potential of AI-based systems including robo-advice. These two papers review the psychological and relational dynamics that arise from "algorithm aversion".

Powerful geopolitical, demographic, environmental, technological and sociological trends are reshaping our world, impacting investment risk and uncertainty and how best to design portfolios capable of improving the financial well-being of individuals.

The things that make people, people, are also the things that bind our portfolio construction methods together. We are impacted not only by our biases in behaviour, but also by the biases we hold that we're not even aware we hold.

To gain deeper insights, critical to long-term investing, we must adapt by integrating finance with other disciplines. Adopting a holistic perspective can greatly improve problem-solving, bringing valuable benefits to our clients' portfolios.

Our diverse panel of experts identified their key takeouts from Strategies Summit 2024 and the portfolio construction implications.

The Big Five model of personality traits remains the dominant framework in personality research. Increasingly, it appears that aspects of investor sentiment and decision-making can also be explained by Big Five personality traits.

It is well-established that investors and service providers should take human behaviour into account when making financial decisions. These papers look at how two techniques drawn from psychology - financial nudging and financial mindfulness - can influence investor behaviour.

When evaluating investment performance, we generally acknowledge a fundamental distinction between skill and luck. This research paper looks at the concept of “moral luck” and finds that the outcome of an investment recommendation may shape others’ evaluations of both the skill and the morality of the investment adviser.

The idea that individuals are more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains is critical in investment decision-making. Two recent papers highlight that loss aversion/tolerance is a more nuanced phenomenon than is commonly recognised.

The future state of the economy and markets depends, in part, on what people expect it will be. Understanding people's expectations, and how and why they form and revise them, has important implications for portfolio construction practice.

We are in an investment environment like that of the pre-GFC period. Bonds will offer higher levels of both income and diversification, within a multi-asset portfolio.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of attention and its relationship to key economic concepts (utility, risk-taking, social preferences, and learning), and the emerging role of AI in the modern economy.

This paper provides a penetrating view into some of the motivational dynamics in play for individual investors who select sustainability-related investments, and implications for financial intermediaries who manufacture and sell such products.

This lecture argues that client behaviour profiling should be a critical first step of the financial advice process. It examines why ethical client profiling - leveraging off psychology, behavioural finance, ethics, and the financial advice process - is necessary to successfully deliver consistent positive client outcomes. NOTE: This lecture is available for purchase - go to https://portfolioconstructionforum.edu.au/on-the-hunt/