The cost of financial illiteracy is high. From distorted markets to mangled individual retirement plans, some of the consequences have become all too familiar for investment professionals. Can efforts to raise financial literacy change behaviors and promote better outcomes? The May/June issue of “CFA Institute Magazine” examines the scope and scale of financial illiteracy and initiatives designed to address the problem, including efforts by local CFA Institute member societies. Read more
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Terrorism and financial crises continue to grab headlines, but they pale when compared to three mega-trends that humanity must address in the coming decades. Read more
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Is investment management a business or a profession? How do you build an ethical culture? And how do you deal with stewardship of client assets, the management and disclosure of conflicts of interest and structuring and reporting fees and compensation? These were some of the difficult questions that experienced investment professionals debated at the inaugural Professionalism Conference organized by CFA Society of the UK. Here are the highlights. Read more
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John Coates, senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge, offers a number of fascinating lessons from a booming new field, the biology of risk, revealing how risk taking and stress transform our body chemistry and drive us to irrational exuberance or pessimism. When such chemical surges overwhelm traders and investors, they tend to suffer either euphoric overconfidence or extreme timidity. Read more
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In the first quarter of 2013, institutional investors added to their equity holdings in the healthcare sector while reducing their exposure to the technology stocks. Among the most widely held stocks, portfolio managers as a group added to positions in Citigroup (C), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Microsoft (MSFT), and BlackRock (BLK), and trimmed positions in Apple (AAPL), Oracle (ORCL), Pfizer (PFE), and Coca-Cola (KO). Read more
1 CommentWith unprecedented changes in the foreign institutional investor quota and related rules, as well as the hint of further new policy moves by the government, the China A-Shares market is starting to attract investor interest once again. Read more
Leave a CommentIn a recent poll conducted in the CFA Institute Financial NewsBrief, we asked readers, “Should fund managers be required to disclose their portfolio holdings on a quarterly basis?” Nearly 77% of the 737 global respondents think fund managers should be required to disclose their portfolio holdings on a quarterly basis, while about 23% of respondents don’t believe managers should have to reveal their positions every three months. Read more
3 CommentsOften financial analysts are presented with statistical charts that purport to demonstrate an important — and, of course, investable — relationship between data points. These charts are supposed to be worth a thousand words and thousands of shares traded. But invariably these charts do not have an r-squared for the data displayed, or any other descriptive statistical data; just the seductive image. Read more
15 CommentsVikram Mansharamani, a lecturer at Yale, discusses five lenses for identifying historical asset bubbles that then burst and provides examples of where his lenses point to a bubble (China) and where they don’t point to a bubble (food prices). Read more
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