While it is well established that equity valuations impact medium-term equity returns. It is less well known that starting period equity valuations also impact medium-term equity volatility and bond-equity correlations.

Understanding what is going on under the bonnet at central banks is key to understanding what will drive markets – and therefore how to best position portfolios.

Faced with the prospect of rising yields, some investors are cutting bond allocations. But the bond market can offer compensation against rising rates.

Our Forum Fodder e-newsletter alerts Members to what's new on PortfolioConstruction.com.au and live progams. Disruption is an unplanned theme in this week's Fodder with Mohamed El-Erian & Dominic McCormick

There is huge variety in retirement income strategies. This paper introduces "longevity risk aversion" and its impact on safe withdrawal rates.

It is time to start looking at alternative assets. Not because there is any pressing need to invest today, but because thorough analysis takes time and mistakes can be expensive.

Older adults are crossing the most challenging and complex frontier of their lives. To earn a role with them, financial advisers have to learn more about how older clients think and communicate.

Stein's law, a rule of thumb for politics, economics and business, is that "If something can't continue, it will stop." Here are four inevitable changes in the investing environment.

Divorcing your debt benchmark and adopting more unconstrained approach to debt investing and offering degrees of freedom to the portfolio manager is the new "core".

The Academy Autumn Seminar 2014 featured four sessions: 10 golden rules for portfolio construction; Reassessing the global debt spectrum; Currency revisited - to hedge or not to hedge; Volatility investing - the next frontier.

Against a backdrop of currency slides, yield spikes and chronic equity underperformance, we invited our EM experts to defend their asset class against three charges.

Recently, I ran a session for a group of 20-years plus CFP veterans. What became evident was that their idea of using technology and engaging collaboratively with clients was very different to mine.

Target date funds are becoming the workhorse for DC plans but there are problems with the approach. This paper offers a portfolio construction framework to overcome them.

The active versus passive debate was recently given a boost when Warren Buffet suggested in his annual letter that most investors are better off investing passively.

A recent Australian study of how clients prefer to be communicated with from their financial advisers sheds some interesting light on the challenge.

The challenge for investors over the past several years is that diversification did not work as expected. The dynamic nature of correlation must be factored into portfolio modeling.

While most financial advisers aspire to work with HNW clients, very few successfully do so with any scale or significance. Most advisers will have a few HNW clients, but all too few of them. Why?

So the US budget deficit is contracting because government consumption is falling? It is really just an accounting illusion. Financial repression is still the order of the day.

When meeting with a prospect for the first time, financial advisers should limit discussion about their background to 3 minutes and address the 4 key questions most prospects want answered.

Does Fama and French's latest work, A Five-Factor Asset Pricing Model, provide any information that can be of practical value to advisers or investors? The answer is no.