The 7th annual Portfolio Construction Forum took place in what for many professionals would be considered the eye of a financial hurricane. The news over the prior 12 months had been awful in virtually every domestic financial sector, and the world was fighting through a global credit crisis that had replaced the days of easy money and leverage with a liquidity crisis and flight to quality that threatened international returns for the next half-decade. Delegates arrived with a single mission: to deconstruct the root causes of the domestic and global meltdown, and figure out how to help their clients ride out the storm...

This presentation and underlying research paper explore relative price strength screens that can be used to identify trends and determine the right time to invest, and demonstrate the significant value that has been added over time by "listening to the market" in this way...

This presentation and underlying research paper presents analysis suggesting we have entered a fourth wave of inflation and strong commodity price growth that may continue for the next 10 to 12 years and therefore investments in agriculture are becoming increasingly attractive...

This presentation and underlying research paper address which real estate asset classes will perform best over the next five to seven years and why...

This presentation and underlying research examine an alternative approach using a combination of fundamental stock level research and quantitative methods to estimate ex-ante portfolio risk based on exposure to three primary characteristics...

Risk profiling is generally agreed to be an important part of the financial planning process – and, yet, it is something that generates large measures of skepticism, controversy and, from time to time, attention from the regulators. Ensuring a portfolio is within the bounds of both a client's risk tolerance and risk capacity is critical - just getting one right is not good enough...

The 2007 PortfolioConstruction Conference program again challenged delegates' thinking about how they design and build investor portfolios - and it would have been hard to pick a better time to bring together 500 of Australia's leading portfolio construction professionals...

It would have been hard to pick a better time to bring together 500 of Australia's leading portfolio construction professionals. Conference came hard on the heels of the 30 June deadline for post-tax super contributions of up to $1 million and then, during conference week, the US subprime meltdown shaved 6% off global equities...

David discusses his ground-breaking research into Australian's mortality, and the common misconceptions that are undermining the integrity of their portfolios...

Many planners still use long term historical returns to estimate future market returns on the basis that, if the historical period is long enough, everything smoothes out. This is pure bunk. In order to demonstrate this as conclusively as possible, we illustrate the impact of using 20 year historical returns as forecasts for the subsequent decade across six major equity markets over the past 107 years...

You learn a vast amount in a week. Here are my key takeouts from Day 1...

Near the end of each decade, a bubble seems to emerge in financial markets...

This paper examines traditional approaches to buying international equities, highlighting some of the problems with capitalisation-weighted benchmarks, and suggesting that replicating a global index may no longer be the optimal solution for those investors with longer-term investment horizons. It looks at some of the new strategies available to capture beta and illustrates how diversification can be used to manage risk for investors in a less constrained portfolio.

The 5th Annual PortfolioConstruction Conference featured a core, independent 13-hour plenary program over the two days, designed by the PortfolioConstruction Forum's specialist, experienced and independent team. As always, we selected our plenary speakers based solely on their portfolio expertise (not the size of their wallets! None of our plenary speakers paid to speak)...

Following on from the successful offerings of Nexus 1, 2 and 3 by Deutsche Bank, Nexus 4 - the first foray into a managed CDO by Nexus - has recently announced that it has suffered an event of default in its income portfolio...

A recent study out of the US takes a shot at what you may believe about dollar cost averaging, one of the sacred cows of investment…

Emerging markets have been out of favour with mainstream investors since the series of financial shocks in the late 1990s that culminated with the default by Russia on its sovereign bonds in 1997. So what has changed since then, to bring emerging market debt back into favour (with a number of new products being released that provide exposure to emerging market debt)?

How would a global bird flu pandemic affect financial markets? If past history, including the effect of SARS in 2003 is anything to go by, the effect would be significant...

As we took the Global Energy and Commodities Investing Forum around the country, one of the hot discussion points was total return investing and portfolio construction...

In each You Asked For It, we ask the public research houses to respond to topical portfolio construction questions of the day. This fortnight, it’s hedge funds. Are they an asset class? Should they be classified as growth investments, defensive, both or neither? Seven research houses responded…