Powerful geopolitical, demographic, environmental, technological and sociological trends are reshaping our world, impacting investment risk and uncertainty and how best to design portfolios capable of improving the financial well-being of individuals.

The Big Five model of personality traits remains the dominant framework in personality research. Increasingly, it appears that aspects of investor sentiment and decision-making can also be explained by Big Five personality traits.

Private debt has grown in popularity as an alternative source of debt financing, with the asset class tripling in size since 2008. This self-paced, two-hour online short course equips you with the expertise to navigate private debt investment confidently across diverse market conditions.

It is well-established that investors and service providers should take human behaviour into account when making financial decisions. These papers look at how two techniques drawn from psychology - financial nudging and financial mindfulness - can influence investor behaviour.

When evaluating investment performance, we generally acknowledge a fundamental distinction between skill and luck. This research paper looks at the concept of “moral luck” and finds that the outcome of an investment recommendation may shape others’ evaluations of both the skill and the morality of the investment adviser.

The idea that individuals are more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains is critical in investment decision-making. Two recent papers highlight that loss aversion/tolerance is a more nuanced phenomenon than is commonly recognised.

Three articles provide us with insights into the impact that the growth in passive management has had on the performance of active managers; the risks taken by active managers and the general efficiency of markets; and, the behaviour of markets.

The future state of the economy and markets depends, in part, on what people expect it will be. Understanding people's expectations, and how and why they form and revise them, has important implications for portfolio construction practice.

Three investment experts offer and debate their high conviction thesis on a long-term, deep rooted structural change impacting markets over a decade or more.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of attention and its relationship to key economic concepts (utility, risk-taking, social preferences, and learning), and the emerging role of AI in the modern economy.

This paper provides a penetrating view into some of the motivational dynamics in play for individual investors who select sustainability-related investments, and implications for financial intermediaries who manufacture and sell such products.

This report summarises the key observations from ASIC's review of how issuers of investment products are meeting design and distribution obligations and areas for improvement.

This lecture argues that client behaviour profiling should be a critical first step of the financial advice process. It examines why ethical client profiling - leveraging off psychology, behavioural finance, ethics, and the financial advice process - is necessary to successfully deliver consistent positive client outcomes. NOTE: This lecture is available for purchase - go to https://portfolioconstructionforum.edu.au/on-the-hunt/

The WallStreetBets phenomenon - and the sensational short squeeze of Gamestop in 2021 in particular - demonstrated the potentially dramatic influence of collective retail behaviour on financial markets.

Since central banks abandoned their ultra-loose monetary policies, currencies once again offer a source of investment returns, as well as portfolio diversification.

While the US dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves is in long-term decline, the currency's dominance will continue despite the rising risk of embedded inflation.

The authors of this paper propose that it's not just confirmation bias, but the way it interacts with a specific set of fundamental beliefs that generates a surprisingly wide array of bias effects.

The bulk of the research on sustainable investing has concentrated on returns. These two papers look beyond that to whether investors are so committed to sustainability that they will continue to invest irrespective of returns or fees.

The most recent evolution in index investing has been a drift into the active world. Until recently, active passive investing has not been subject to much analysis. The two papers considered here begin to make some inroads.

This Research Roundtable focused on the Ruffer Total Return International (Australia) strategy, with senior practitioners deciding, after briefings, Q&A and debate, their individual rating for the strategy and whether to include it on a hypothetical APL and/or multi-manager portfolios. Afterwards, the meeting is truncated and published for on-demand viewing by all Forum members.