This presentation addresses the importance of developing improved and dynamic investment approaches that seek to better understand and manage total portfolio risk as well as identify sources of return.

Individuals are vulnerable to economic and financial risks as they approach and enter retirement. Insights from behavioural finance can be used to enhance risk communication and retirement outcomes.

Investors should be aware of the risks they are exposed to within a portfolio and when they're being paid to take risk (or not). A different approach is needed to build portfolios with better risk awareness.

Formal reports redolent with data and analysis fail to communicate risks as people actually feel them. Reports need to be replaced by rapports, by engaged conversations.

The empirical relation between risk and return in emerging equity markets is flat, or even negative - including controlling for exposures to the size, value and momentum effects.

Company fundamentals don't change nearly as much as equity market prices - and therein lies an opportunity for investors with a longer-term view.

To achieve absolute return objectives, many risk management techniques remain relevant but their application and focus need to change.

Demographic understanding is now one of the most important elements in the areas of government and - importantly for investors - future drivers in financial market returns.

Bonds are no longer risk free. It's time to accept the idea and move on - to broaden the traditional idea of fixed-income as a form of risk mitigation and view it also as a risk-and-return proposition.

China's taken a tough approach to its periphery. This doesn't necessarily spell doom and gloom for Australia and the region.

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.