What influence do personal values have on our behaviour, as individuals? And how do those values interact with professional standards and ethics?

A recent paper that addresses one of the most pressing issues facing the financial community - how to construct long-term investment portfolios to best fit the needs of those saving for retirement - questions the appropriateness of many commonly used techniques.

Portfolio insurance - invented over 40 years ago - has experienced the renaissance that it very much deserves. Trend (momentum) investing dates back over 40 years, too - the success of which is traced back in this paper to over 100 years.

Two recent studies provide evidence that issues unrelated to the fundamental operation of a firm impact their market valuation.

Time-based rebalancing is inefficient. Research suggests that tolerance band rebalancing strategies minimise trading and boost portfolio returns. Such threshold approaches may be used in both the portfolio accumulation and decumulation phase, and act as a pre-commitment device for clients.

Advisers are increasingly eschewing active managed fund managers, and instead are supplanting themselves as tactical managers of "passive" ETF funds.

Janet Yellen says another crisis is not likely, yet signs of stress are growing and valuations are stretched. Investors need a strategy for weathering a storm, whether or not there is one on the horizon.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that chronological (C) age is dominated by biological (B) age as a better proxy for longevity risk. Practitioners must consider both ages when building portfolios and structuring retirement spending strategies.

Two recent studies shed light on retirement income planning. One proposes a framework to avoid the pitfalls of shortfall probabilities. The other finds biological age impacts spending rates.

While the use of a discount rate to compare strategies or choices that are dispersed or occur over time is useful, the proper discount rate is the investor's expected rate of return, means that the "right" discount rate will vary from one person to the next.

Two new studies provide widespread evidence of mispricings/irrationalities across world equity markets. One in particular provides valuable insight into managing risk in equity investing.

Observing how a client makes financial trade-offs can provide a more accurate measure of their risk preferences than if we ask questions about what they think they would do.

Unlike other commonly used factors, very little research has been undertaken on the quality factor - which makes a newly released paper very interesting. Another new paper extends the usual momentum factor into "returns signal momentum".

Can clients easily change their behaviour? The theory of planned behaviour can help to promote real change and convert intentions into outcomes.

Short-term thinking in finance is nothing new. The benefits of long-term investing extend beyond just being able to invest in illiquid assets. Patience can pay its own dividend.

Requiring investment managers to perform relative to a benchmark, including imposing tracking error constraints, causes short-term'ism.

The danger that “sequence of return risk” can devastate a retirement portfolio is both increasingly recognised and frequently misunderstood. Three concrete, research-driven strategies can help manage it.

It is time to properly account for risk characteristics of client’s most valuable asset - their human capital. This isn’t easy to implement and places practitioners in a difficult situation...