If geopolitics is far more important in considering investment markets today, how do we integrate geopolitics into portfolio construction?

With global volatility at multi decade lows, the critical questions become: should we be worried or relaxed? What next? In fact, quiescent markets should be feared, not embraced.

In recent years, the risk parity approach to asset allocation has been gaining popularity. Evidence supports it but confidence in its efficacy requires a theoretical justification.

As we sit today with some unprecedented market conditions, it's probably more relevant than ever to understand both sides of the risk and return equation in the fixed income space.

Is risk parity's outperformance in the past decade sustainable or just a quirk of the unusual markets.

To flourish in the robo-advice era, portfolio construction practitioners must provide clients with a positive Return on Attention (ROA), Intimacy (ROI) and Empathy (ROE).

What return premia - if any - are attached to different types of investment risk? And just how reliable those premia are in practice? Can the risks be diversified?

For many Australians, their house is one of their biggest assets, if not the biggest. But a leveraged owner-occupied home is riskier than the sharemarket.

We need to relate to investors in such a way that they can once again know and trust that financial security is a fact, not a feeling.

The traditional approach to portfolio construction is to own a diversified portfolio, adjusting total risk up or down. An alternative is to take a bucket approach.

A sustained period of lower global growth, rich valuations from traditional assets and an eerie calm before the storm in asset price volatility require a different approach to asset allocation.

Public equity valuations have disconnected from underlying earnings and there is a distorted link between perceived and actual risk.

In managing a risk on/risk off world, investors can maintain or increase exposure to growth assets while experiencing a smoother ride.

The top six stocks in the ASX 300 represent 45% of market cap and 50% of market risk. A 4% TE constrained manager must hold 15%-20% in these six stocks even if they do not like them.

The seismic shift in fixed income after a 30-year bull market for bonds has created significant portfolio construction challenges and opportunities.

To ensure risk is genuinely well diversified takes a forward-looking scenario-analysis process to combine quantitative rigor with qualitative insights of the plausible but unlikely extreme stresses we might face.

When looking to reconnect risk and return in portfolios, what better place to start than with the barometer of equity market risk itself?

The size of the global infrastructure asset universe will expand from $40 trillion earlier this decade to over $110 trillion by 2030, presenting significant opportunities to invest.

Alpha Potential is gaining traction as another important quantitative tool. Its use lies in identifying opportunities for active management of Australian equities amongst other asset classes.

Investing in unconstrained fixed income strategies with more flexibility to change duration and sector exposures can have a positive impact on a portfolio’s overall risk and return profile.