This week in Fodder, we feature Professor Moshe Milevsky's top-rated presentation from our recent Strategies Conference, Tim Farrelly highlights two areas where practitioners have a clear advantage over the best fund managers, Dom McCormick analyses the pro's and con's of participating in Magellan's upcoming "monster" closed end listed investment trust IPO. Harvard's Prof Carmen Reinhart warns that while the dollar's status as the world's major reserve currency makes it easy for the US to keep running its 25-year long current-account deficit, it doesn't make it a good idea. And the economics team from Payden & Rygel have created a whiteboard animation to explain why investors can stop worrying about the impact on long-term interest rates of the Fed shrinking its balance sheet.

The US has run chronic current-account deficits for almost two generations. Pointing the finger at surplus countries is getting old.

The Conexus Group Insurance Summit (29 August 2017) has been assessed and accredited by Portfolio Construction Forum for Forum CE hours. Delegates must confirm their attendance in order to receive CE acceditation.

Xi Jinping would like to oversee China’s rise to regional dominance - but the US, Japan and India will not allow China alone to dominate the region.

Constructing portfolios that capture the upside while limiting the downside is more important than ever. Derivatives can help multi-asset investors in three key ways.

There are many risks and uncertainties as retired clients face the next 20 to 40 years. The uncertainty related to the period of retirement can be allowed for, to enable retirees to have a higher living standard during their retirement years.

Researchers propose a range of improvements to traditional time-based rebalancing, including threshold and cash flow strategies, designed to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

The IMCA Au Seminar 6 (21 Aug 2017) has been assessed and accredited by PortfolioConstruction Forum for Forum CE hours. Delegates must attest their attendance in order to receive CE acceditation.

As some institutional investors build internal impact investing capabilities, the inclusion of impact investments in portfolios may be on the cusp of becoming mainstream.

The relationship between organisational culture and relative performance has significant implications for active asset managers, given their dependence on effective collaboration and decision making.

Portfolio construction practitioners have traditionally split into two camps - passive indexers, or active investors aiming to either pick winning companies or fund managers who can identify such companies. In this Critical Issues Forum session at the 2011 Conference, US-based researcher Michael Kitces provided a new and robust framework to understand the opportunities for value creation in portfolios...

Game theory, econometrics and distributed computing power can reveal a client's true preferences for risk, loss, uncertainty, time and goals – with scientific precision and in terms that clients can understand.

Do you know the impacts of the risk characteristics of your multi-manager portfolio? Better portfolio construction occurs when you don't diversify the risk you are trying to capture. Beware the benchmark hugger - it might be you?

Shifts in economic and trade regimes and turning points in markets provide asset managers the opportunity to capitalise on short-term distortions in asset prices and to invest in companies that could be winners in the long term.

This paper explores the issues and challenges associated with longevity and sequencing risk, especially in the current market environment, and examines how alternative investments offer investors potential solutions for these risks.

Investors often shy from investing in “non-traditional” sources of Risk Premia, but to maximise the probability of achieving positive excess returns, a well-diversified and risk-controlled mix of Risk Premium strategies is essential.

Ensuring your investment process incorporates sustainability factors - climate change, global food shortages, water shortages, and poverty, as well as safety, management and governance scandals - adds up to better outcomes.

Two assumptions are under challenge - that the past offers a reliable guide to the future in terms of asset class returns; and, that traditional relative risk/return approaches can still deliver the returns investors need.

The outcome of selecting an active management strategy will likely be greater when both the creativity and predictability of the candidate are considered in equal measure.

With US unemployment at a 15-year low, the US Federal Reserve has greater scope to begin shrinking its balance sheet. Investors should set aside their fears, and remember that the Fed’s balance sheet provides little indication about what will happen to longer term interest rates.