Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) as an Asset Class. Implicatons for Asset Allocation

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) as an Asset Class. Implicatons for Asset Allocation
Author: Alexander Hardt
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3656697558

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, Texas A&M University (Texas A&M University-Commerce), language: English, abstract: This thesis examines optimized portfolios of three investor types during four different time intervals ranging from 1998 to 2013 to determine if the inclusion of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) has benefits for institutional investors such as pension plans, university endowments, foundations and sovereign wealth funds. The three investor types used in this study differ in their risk tolerance, with the more risk-averse investor type choosing not to include certain asset classes in his investment portfolio. The efficient frontier algorithm, developed by Prof. Harry Markowitz, is used to determine whether the inclusion of TIPS improves the risk/return profile of the portfolio. Sharpe ratio, developed by Prof. William Sharpe, is used to measure a portfolio’s risk adjusted performance. The study found that the benefits of the inclusion of TIPS in a portfolio vary by time period and investor type. While all investors were able to improve their risk return profile, the more risk-averse investor type benefits to a larger degree from the inclusion of TIPS. Furthermore, a significant increase in the financial efficiency was only observed in the 1998 to 2002 period. Therefore, the researcher concludes that the TIPS market is quite dynamic and investors need to take into account forward-looking information to profit from the inclusion of TIPS in investment portfolios.

Unconventional Success

Unconventional Success
Author: David F. Swensen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2005-08-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 074327461X

The bestselling author of Pioneering Portfolio Management, the definitive template for institutional fund management, returns with a book that shows individual investors how to manage their financial assets. In Unconventional Success, investment legend David F. Swensen offers incontrovertible evidence that the for-profit mutual fund industry consistently fails the average investor. From excessive management fees to the frequent "churning" of portfolios, the relentless pursuit of profits by mutual fund management companies harms individual clients. Perhaps most destructive of all are the hidden schemes that limit investor choice and reduce returns, including "pay-to-play" product-placement fees, stale-price trading scams, soft-dollar kickbacks, and 12b-1 distribution charges. Even if investors manage to emerge unscathed from an encounter with the profit-seeking mutual fund industry, individuals face the likelihood of self-inflicted pain. The common practice of selling losers and buying winners (and doing both too often) damages portfolio returns and increases tax liabilities, delivering a one-two punch to investor aspirations. In short: Nearly insurmountable hurdles confront ordinary investors. Swensen's solution? A contrarian investment alternative that promotes well-diversified, equity-oriented, "market-mimicking" portfolios that reward investors who exhibit the courage to stay the course. Swensen suggests implementing his nonconformist proposal with investor-friendly, not-for-profit investment companies such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF. By avoiding actively managed funds and employing client-oriented mutual fund managers, investors create the preconditions for investment success. Bottom line? Unconventional Success provides the guidance and financial know-how for improving the personal investor's financial future.

Balanced Asset Allocation

Balanced Asset Allocation
Author: Alex Shahidi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014-12-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 111871217X

The conventional portfolio is prone to frequent and potentially devastating losses because it is NOT balanced to different economic outcomes. In contrast, a truly balanced portfolio can help investors reduce risk and more reliably achieve their objectives. This simple fact would surprise most investors, from beginners to professionals. Investment consultant Alex Shahidi puts his 15 years of experience advising the most sophisticated investors in the world and managing multi-billion dollar portfolios to work in this important resource for investors. You will better understand why nearly every portfolio is poorly balanced and how to view the crucial asset allocation decision from a deeper, more thoughtful perspective. The concepts presented are simple, intuitive and easy to implement for every investor. Author Alex Shahidi will walk you through the logic behind the balanced portfolio framework and provide step-by-step instructions on how to build a truly balanced portfolio. No book has ever been written that discusses asset allocation in this light. Provides insights from a top-ranked investment consultant using strategies from the industry’s brightest minds Proposes a balanced asset allocation that can achieve stable returns through various economic climates Introduces sophisticated concepts in very simple terms For those who want to better manage their investment portfolio and seek a more advanced approach to building a balanced portfolio, Balanced Asset Allocation: How to Profit in Any Economic Climate provides an in-depth treatment of the topic that can be put to use immediately.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
Author: Taylor Larimore
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2006-04-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0471779210

Within this easy-to-use, need-to-know, no-frills guide to building financial well-being is advice for long-term wealth creation and happiness, without all the worries and fuss of stock pickers and day traders.

The Only Guide to Alternative Investments You'll Ever Need

The Only Guide to Alternative Investments You'll Ever Need
Author: Larry E. Swedroe
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2010-05-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470885335

The rewards of carefully chosen alternative investments can be great. But many investors don’t know enough about unfamiliar investments to make wise choices. For that reason, financial advisers Larry Swedroe and Jared Kizer designed this book to bring investors up to speed on the twenty most popular alternative investments: Real estate, Inflation-protected securities, Commodities, International equities, Fixed annuities, Stable-value funds, High-yield (junk) bonds, Private equity (venture capital), Covered calls, Socially responsible mutual funds, Precious metals equities, Preferred stocks, Convertible bonds, Emerging market bonds, Hedge funds, Leveraged buyouts, Variable annuities, Equity-indexed annuities, Structured investment products, Leveraged funds The authors describe how the investments work, the pros and cons of each, which to consider, which to avoid, and how to get started. Swedroe and Kizer evaluate each investment in terms of: Expected returns Volatility Distribution of returns Diversification potential Fees Trading and operating expenses Liquidity Tax efficiency Account location Role in an asset-allocation program Any investor who is considering or just curious about investment opportunities outside the traditional world of stocks, bonds, and bank certificates of deposit would be well-advised to read this book.

Commodities as an Asset Class in Portfolio Management

Commodities as an Asset Class in Portfolio Management
Author: Friederike Erhorn
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2011-04-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3640888790

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Essen, language: English, abstract: Commodities have become an important tool in portfolio management strategies due to their good performance, the bullish outlook for this asset class over the next decade with commodity prices setting new highs and in contrast, the highly volatile performance of stocks and bonds as well as the major equity crashes in recent years. This book analyses why and which commodities should be added to your portfolio. It gives a thorough introduction and analyses: • Basic concepts of portfolio management and commodities • Different investment exposures to commodities • Return decomposition of commodity futures • Evidence that commodities constitute an asset class • Comparison of the different asset classes regarding risk, return and correlation as well as the performance analysis of the single asset classes with regard to the business cycle and inflation • Efficient frontiers of portfolios with and without commodities over different periods of time The key objective of this study is to investigate how commodities as an asset class influence the risk-return-ratio of a traditional portfolio in a passive investment strategy over various periods of time.

The White Coat Investor

The White Coat Investor
Author: James M. Dahle
Publisher: White Coat Investor LLC the
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2014-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780991433100

Written by a practicing emergency physician, The White Coat Investor is a high-yield manual that specifically deals with the financial issues facing medical students, residents, physicians, dentists, and similar high-income professionals. Doctors are highly-educated and extensively trained at making difficult diagnoses and performing life saving procedures. However, they receive little to no training in business, personal finance, investing, insurance, taxes, estate planning, and asset protection. This book fills in the gaps and will teach you to use your high income to escape from your student loans, provide for your family, build wealth, and stop getting ripped off by unscrupulous financial professionals. Straight talk and clear explanations allow the book to be easily digested by a novice to the subject matter yet the book also contains advanced concepts specific to physicians you won't find in other financial books. This book will teach you how to: Graduate from medical school with as little debt as possible Escape from student loans within two to five years of residency graduation Purchase the right types and amounts of insurance Decide when to buy a house and how much to spend on it Learn to invest in a sensible, low-cost and effective manner with or without the assistance of an advisor Avoid investments which are designed to be sold, not bought Select advisors who give great service and advice at a fair price Become a millionaire within five to ten years of residency graduation Use a "Backdoor Roth IRA" and "Stealth IRA" to boost your retirement funds and decrease your taxes Protect your hard-won assets from professional and personal lawsuits Avoid estate taxes, avoid probate, and ensure your children and your money go where you want when you die Minimize your tax burden, keeping more of your hard-earned money Decide between an employee job and an independent contractor job Choose between sole proprietorship, Limited Liability Company, S Corporation, and C Corporation Take a look at the first pages of the book by clicking on the Look Inside feature Praise For The White Coat Investor "Much of my financial planning practice is helping doctors to correct mistakes that reading this book would have avoided in the first place." - Allan S. Roth, MBA, CPA, CFP(R), Author of How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street "Jim Dahle has done a lot of thinking about the peculiar financial problems facing physicians, and you, lucky reader, are about to reap the bounty of both his experience and his research." - William J. Bernstein, MD, Author of The Investor's Manifesto and seven other investing books "This book should be in every career counselor's office and delivered with every medical degree." - Rick Van Ness, Author of Common Sense Investing "The White Coat Investor provides an expert consult for your finances. I now feel confident I can be a millionaire at 40 without feeling like a jerk." - Joe Jones, DO "Jim Dahle has done for physician financial illiteracy what penicillin did for neurosyphilis." - Dennis Bethel, MD "An excellent practical personal finance guide for physicians in training and in practice from a non biased source we can actually trust." - Greg E Wilde, M.D Scroll up, click the buy button, and get started today!

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio
Author: Alexander Green
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-04-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119817854

Learn how to invest, relax, and let your money do the work with this incredible guide Fully revised, updated, and expanded for the first time since its New York Times Best-Selling debut in 20TK, the legendary Alexander Green's essential guide for individual investors spells out stock-market success for everyone from first-timers to seasoned pros. The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life, Second Edition delivers a long-term investment strategy that lets you reap the rewards of financial success with a simple, yet sophisticated, strategy that increases returns, reduces risk, and leaves you with time to enjoy the finer things in life. You'll learn about the fundamental relationship between risk and reward in the financial markets and get a trading insider's view of how the investment industry actually works. With The Gone Fishin' Portfolio, you'll also discover: How to take your financial future into your own hands How to invest in a way that doesn’t require you to spend every waking moment worrying about your money How to avoid the most common traps the investment industry sets for you Why skilled investing doesn't have to be complicated Perfect for individual investors who want to put their money to work for them, The Gone Fishin' Portfolio gives you all the tools you need to manage your own money and maximize your investment returns today.