For much of the past four decades, the key to investing success was to stay long (and get longer!) risk assets. Even in the changed environment of 2020-2024, going with the flow was a good strategy most of the time. But is that still the case? Strategies Summit 2025 (Wed-Thu 20-21 Aug) will challenge and refresh your portfolio construction thinking by debating contemporary and emerging portfolio construction strategies to help you build better quality portfolios.

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.

If there is one thing those in the finance industry should understand, it is how markets function. The starting point is the Efficient Market Hypothesis - however EMH is amazingly poorly understood.

According to the latest generation of behavioural finance theory, individuals seek life wellbeing (underpinned by financial wellbeing) which additionally incorporates non-financial factors.

Established in 2002, Strategies Summit is THE portfolio construction strategies conference of the year. Presented each August, the program features 50+ carefully selected leading investment thinkers who will challenge and refresh your portfolio construction thinking by debating contemporary and emerging portfolio construction strategies, for you to consider applying in practice to build better quality portfolios.

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".

Short breaks can improve decision-making and overall performance. A 2023 study found that holidays "meaningfully improve" the accuracy of equity analysts' earnings forecasts.

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.

Multi-asset, multi-manager investment portfolios can be viewed as complex machines that, if properly assembled and managed, provide benefits far outweighing those of their individual components. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts! Strategies Summit 2024 (Wed-Thu 21-22 Aug) challenged and refreshed delegates' portfolio construction thinking by debating contemporary and emerging portfolio construction strategies to help them build better quality portfolios.

Wetware-powered AI is changing the way we manage risk and uncertainty, including in financial markets. Its rise will also profoundly change how humans think about the nature of reality — in finance and more generally.

Read any book on Complexity Science and the first example of a Complex Adaptive System is the economy and financial markets. Complex systems exhibit "emergence" which means that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

I was speaking to a new doctoral student whose thesis is on the role of risk profiling in the development of an investment strategy. This led us to discuss why risk profiling was important and the purpose of investment advice.