Practical analysis for investment professionals
02 November 2015

Top Five Articles from October: Dumb Alpha and Wealth Management Trends

Posted In: Best Of

1. What Trends Are Influencing the Future of Wealth Management?

A changing client base driven by demographic shifts will pose challenges for managers, who tend to have different characteristics from the clients they serve, writes Ed McCarthy. Managers must also deal with an acute talent shortage and difficulty attracting new talent.

2. Dumb Alpha: The Ignoramus’s Guide to Asset Allocation

Modern finance constantly busies itself with the development of new, more sophisticated ways to manage risk and generate returns, says Joachim Klement, CFA. These efforts, however, generate their own risks. On the opposite end of the spectrum are simple ways to invest that have a proven track record of providing superior investment outcomes.

3. Making Sense of Long-Term Returns

All advisers face the same challenge, says Michael Batnick, CFA: How can we best help investors understand what sort of long-term returns they can rationally expect? This is an extremely important topic. It forms the basis of Social Security projections, pension estimates, and determining how much a household needs to save to retire comfortably.

4. Why Hasn’t Active Management Outperformed Passive Investing in Recent Years?

In a recent CFA Institute Financial NewsBrief poll, we decided to ask our readers their explanation for the lack of active management outperformance compared to passive investing. The result indicates a tug-of-war between camps, and according to Jason Voss, CFA, reflects the conversation occurring in the financial community in the long-running active vs. passive debate.

5. Insights from a Recruiter

When is the right time to reach out to a recruiter? If you are being recruited for a particular job, how long can you realistically expect the process to take? Debra Brown, a New York-based recruiter for Russell Reynolds’s asset and wealth management practice, sheds some light on these and other questions and offers career management advice tailored specifically for investment professionals.

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/erhui1979

About the Author(s)
Paul McCaffrey

Paul McCaffrey is the editor of Enterprising Investor at CFA Institute. Previously he served as an editor at the H.W. Wilson Company. His writing has appeared in Financial Planning and On Wall Street, among other publications. He is a graduate of Vassar College and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

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