Slowing growth with extreme recession risk, coupled with a combative populist government, may well see Italy trigger a crisis in European debt and the currency, causing a substantial global volatility event.

Rates are normalising, populism is on the rise, technology is driving disruption. But not every perceived winner will win and not every perceived loser will be destroyed forever.

On some measures, global equity valuations are the most attractive in several years. Risks, however, have certainly increased and in many cases are more difficult to frame.

For most of the last 10 years, the world's major central banks have been creating significant amounts of cheap money, inflating several bubbles. Those bubbles are beginning to burst.

Drawing on his unique background as part of the elite leadership team of the CIA's Clandestine Service, David shares his views and analysis of the current geopolitical landscape.

Much macroeconomic analysis is very narrow in scope. ESG factors are ignored all together. A new indicator of national progress measures economic dynamism and progress on meeting ESG goals.

Two of the defining characteristics of the global investment landscape over the last 30 years are being reversed - globalisation (by economic nationalism) and finalisation (as we've reached peak debt).

Australian investors have a different perspective on foreign currency to investors elsewhere in the world, and this should be reflected in how local portfolios are built.

The UBS "Fixed Income Considerations" Whitepaper (January 2019) has been assessed and accredited by Portfolio Construction Forum for Continuing Education (CE/CPD) hours.

A recent research paper looks at the impact of "The Donald" on markets, while a second examines the impact of robo-advice on investor behaviour.

This view has dominated finance theory for the last 50 years or so. But prices change because people trade, and those trades leave behind a trace of all the behavioural biases people bring.

Two recent papers looking at hedge funds provide further evidence that the more proactive managers are the best performers.

Potential returns on traditional assets are falling and the search is on for different sources of attractive returns. The Australian Asset Backed Loans asset class deserves a place in many portfolios.

Two recent research papers on investment management look firstly at the implications of overconfident managers and, secondly, at career risk associated with poor investment performance.

Markowitz informed us of the risk-reduction advantages of diversification. But just how diversified does an investor have to be to realise almost all of the benefits of diversification?

In the cyber world today, we are somewhere around World War I. There are more than 30 nations with effective cyber forces. Practitioners need to understand the threat cyber weapons pose to markets and investments.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) invests heavily in high technology research. While the world will certainly benefit from the PRC's technological ambition, it also has challenging implications.

Machine learning algorithms are no match for the human brain when it comes to deciding how investment portfolios should be constructed.

Investors like to have their cake and eat it - i.e., they like investment returns (the higher the better) but dislike volatility (particularly negative returns). It is possible to engineer investment returns that meet those requirements.

A disciplined, scenarios-based approach to determining your views on the outlook for markets and the asset allocation implications can help future-proof portfolios. This hypothetical Investment Committee meeting considers the asset allocation implications of three scenarios.