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.

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.

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.

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.