Hamish Douglass, Andrew Canobi, Brett Gillespie, Tim Farrelly, Charles Jamieson, Peter Kim, Stephen Miller, AJ Qualtieri, Randal Jenneke, and Thomas Vester convened to debate their Markets Summit 2019 key takeouts and the portfolio construction implications.

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.

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.

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.

A fundamentally driven and benchmark unaware exposure to smaller companies within the emerging markets sector, this fund represents a unique way for investors to access emerging markets.

Two recent academic papers focus on how advice provided to investors might be distorted. The first relates to the disposition effect; the second looks at the impact compensation on advice given.

Eugene Fama described momentum investing as the one remaining market anomaly. A recent paper gives an explanation for it. Another shows it still offers high profits after implementation costs.

It is generally accepted that stock markets provide long-term outperformance over cash. However, a recent academic research paper reveals this is not the case for the majority of stocks since 1926.

Recent research examines the performance of active bond managers, and the impact of performance fees on returns of active equity funds and private equity funds.

In nine pages, this paper says all that needs to be said on the ability of any of us to estimate the true value of financial assets. The next two papers produce conflicting findings on the impact of index investing on markets.

Trust – the belief that those to whom we are vulnerable are both willing and able to act in our interests – is the no.1 factor in the decision to select and retain an asset manager.

The holy grail is to find active managers who can add value. The combined insights of these two papers suggest avoiding large managed funds, especially those under the control of managers who run a concurrent SMA.

Three recent research papers continue to grow our understanding of how behavioural traits impact on markets. The first provides insights into Warren Buffett's success; the other two examine the markets' response to earnings information.

While some still firmly believe that values and ethics have no part to play in investing, the tide is turning. Values play a vital role in investment and business decisions - and, increasingly, investors care about more than just financial returns.