The only comprehensive guide to reaping big returns investing in the hottest new growth markets This book makes a compelling case that, just as today's well-rounded portfolio includes emerging market funds, tomorrow's well-rounded portfolio will include frontier market funds. More importantly, it alerts you to the vast opportunities and potential pitfalls of investing in frontier markets while providing expert advice and guidance on how to research and invest in the most promising frontier growth markets. Widely considered to be the next emerging markets, frontier markets, such as those of certain sub-Saharan African, Eastern European, Asian, and Central and South American countries, are showing strong signs of reaching economic critical mass. If you are an investor on the lookout for authoritative, actionable information on the next big investment opportunity, this book is for you. Provides sector-by-sector analyses that let you assess opportunities and risks in each frontier market Provides strategies and tools for determining the most efficient methods for executing, monitoring, and exiting investments Guides you through the wide diversity within frontier markets, showing how to differentiate countries on the basis of economic development and wealth distribution and other factors
Where are the next decade's greatest investment opportunities? Veteran investor Marko Dimitrijevic argues that they can be found in frontier markets, which account for seventy-one of the world's seventy-five fastest-growing economies and 19 percent of the world's GDP. Yet many investors ignore them. Fueled by new access to technology and information, frontier markets are emerging even faster than their predecessors, making them an essential component of a globally diversified portfolio. In Frontier Investor, Dimitrijevic shows through colorful case studies, compelling charts, and fascinating travel anecdotes that it is not only possible but prudent to invest in these unfamiliar and undervalued options. Dimitrijevic explains how frontier markets such as Nigeria, Panama, and Bangladesh are poised to follow the similar paths of Chinese, Indian, and Russian markets, which were considered exotic two decades ago. He details a strategy for how and where to invest, directly or indirectly, to profit from frontier growth. Dimitrijevic covers the risks, political and otherwise, of these markets, the megatrends that promise exciting investment opportunities in the coming years, and the prospects for countries beyond the frontier, including Myanmar, Cuba, and even Iran. Rich with experience and insight, Frontier Investor opens up a whole new world—and worldview—to investors.
Exchange traded funds have been called the next generation of mutual funds. Essentially, ETFs are low cost, tax-efficient index funds that trade on a stock exchange. In 1999, there were 33 ETFs trading on North American stock exchanges with assets of US39.6 billion. Five years later, despite going through the worst equity bear market in 70 years, ETFs number over 300 and assets have soared in excess of US300 billion globally. Canada was home to the first successful ETF in the world. Now the largest Canadian ETF, the i60 Fund, is one of the most heavily traded TSX issues.
In spite of theoretical benefits, Markowitz mean-variance (MV) optimized portfolios often fail to meet practical investment goals of marketability, usability, and performance, prompting many investors to seek simpler alternatives. Financial experts Richard and Robert Michaud demonstrate that the limitations of MV optimization are not the result of conceptual flaws in Markowitz theory but unrealistic representation of investment information. What is missing is a realistic treatment of estimation error in the optimization and rebalancing process. The text provides a non-technical review of classical Markowitz optimization and traditional objections. The authors demonstrate that in practice the single most important limitation of MV optimization is oversensitivity to estimation error. Portfolio optimization requires a modern statistical perspective. Efficient Asset Management, Second Edition uses Monte Carlo resampling to address information uncertainty and define Resampled Efficiency (RE) technology. RE optimized portfolios represent a new definition of portfolio optimality that is more investment intuitive, robust, and provably investment effective. RE rebalancing provides the first rigorous portfolio trading, monitoring, and asset importance rules, avoiding widespread ad hoc methods in current practice. The Second Edition resolves several open issues and misunderstandings that have emerged since the original edition. The new edition includes new proofs of effectiveness, substantial revisions of statistical estimation, extensive discussion of long-short optimization, and new tools for dealing with estimation error in applications and enhancing computational efficiency. RE optimization is shown to be a Bayesian-based generalization and enhancement of Markowitz's solution. RE technology corrects many current practices that may adversely impact the investment value of trillions of dollars under current asset management. RE optimization technology may also be useful in other financial optimizations and more generally in multivariate estimation contexts of information uncertainty with Bayesian linear constraints. Michaud and Michaud's new book includes numerous additional proposals to enhance investment value including Stein and Bayesian methods for improved input estimation, the use of portfolio priors, and an economic perspective for asset-liability optimization. Applications include investment policy, asset allocation, and equity portfolio optimization. A simple global asset allocation problem illustrates portfolio optimization techniques. A final chapter includes practical advice for avoiding simple portfolio design errors. With its important implications for investment practice, Efficient Asset Management 's highly intuitive yet rigorous approach to defining optimal portfolios will appeal to investment management executives, consultants, brokers, and anyone seeking to stay abreast of current investment technology. Through practical examples and illustrations, Michaud and Michaud update the practice of optimization for modern investment management.
"The Ages of the Investor: A Critical Look at Life-cycle Investing" is intended to be the first installment in the "Investing for Adults" series. Just as grown-ups do not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, "Investing adults" know that there is no such creature as the Stock-picking Fairy or the Market-timing Fairy. Further, there is no Risk Fairy who will write you cheap options that will protect your stock holdings against loss. Investing adults are familiar with Gene Fama, Zvi Bodie, Jack Bogle, and Burton Malkiel, and understand that a mean variance optimizer does not blend vegetables. In other words, this series is not for beginners. Future topics will, with luck, include the limits of market efficiency and diversification in increasingly non-segmented global markets.
How institutions and individuals can address complex social, financial, and environmental problems on a systemic level—and invest in a more secure future. Investment today has evolved from the basic, conventional approach of the past. Investors have come to recognize the importance of sustainable investment and are more frequently considering environmental and social factors in their decisions. Yet the complexity of the times forces us to recognize and transition to a third stage of investment practice: system-level investing. In this paradigm-shifting book, William Burckart and Steve Lydenberg show how system-level investors support and enhance the health and stability of the social, financial, and environmental systems on which they depend for long-term returns. They preserve and strengthen these fundamental systems while still generating competitive or otherwise acceptable performance. This book is for those investors who believe in that transition. They may be institutions, large or small, concerned about the long-term stability of the environment and society. They may be individual investors who want their children and grandchildren to inherit a just and sustainable world. Whoever they may be, Burckart and Lydenberg show them the what, why, and how of system-level investment in this book: what it means to manage system-level risks and rewards, why it is imperative to do so now, and how to integrate this new way of thinking into their current practice. “Burckart and Lydenberg are the Wayne Gretzkys of investing: Showing us not where investing is, but where it’s going.” —Jon Lukomnik, Managing Partner, Sinclair Capital; Senior Fellow, High Meadows Institute
This volume presents the first comprehensive and authoritative account of the new actors and tools revolutionizing global philanthropy and social investment at the present time. At a time of declining government resources and limited charitable capability, this development represents one of the most hopeful signs for gaining meaningful traction on the globe's escalating problems of poverty, environmental degradation, and despair.
Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, beneficiary organizations—like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations—have been seeking ways to mitigate the risk of their investments and make better financial decisions. For them, Reframing Finance offers a path forward. This book argues that institutional investors would better serve their long-term goals by putting money into large-scale, future-facing projects such as infrastructure, green energy, innovation in agriculture, and real estate development. At the same time, redirecting long-term investments would close significant financial gaps that government cannot. Drawing on key contributions in economic sociology, social network theory, and economics, the book conceptualizes a collaborative model of investment that is already becoming increasingly common: Large investors contribute more directly to private market assets, while financial intermediaries seek to foster co-investment partnerships, better aligning incentives for all. A combination of rich case studies and rigorous theory enables asset owners to move toward more efficient, private-market investing, while also laying groundwork for research at the frontier of finance.
