Smart Portfolios: A Practical Guide to Building and Maintaining Intelligent Investment Portfolios (Robert Carver, 2017)
- Geometric means: consistent return that gives the same final account value
- Standard deviation: a measure of how dispersed some data is around its average
- Gaussian normal distribution: bell curve
- Sharpe ratio: measure the risk-adjusted returns of an asset, the higher the better
- Type of costs: brokerage fees, taxes, annual management fees, other fund management fees, execution costs, trading costs inside funds, initial costs, holding costs, rebalancing costs
- Relative momentum is 100% invested even when prices are falling, absolute momentum holds cash on hand when market is falling
- Smart beta: fully optimised, equal weighting, volatility parity, risk parity, maximum diversification, maximum variance, handcrafted, market cap weighted
- Portfolio maintenance: annual review, reacting to external events, period portfolio reweighting, tax implication
- Portfolio repair: emergency diversification > cut costs > get your asset allocation right > get your emerging / developed, regional and country allocation right > get your equity sector (and bond type and credit) allocation correct > consider individual shares or funds
Asset classes
Traditional equities
- Developed equities
- Emerging equities
- Regions
- Countries
- Sectors
- Individual equities
Equity-like alternative
- Private equity & venture capital
- Real estate
- Infrastructure
- Real assets
- Asset-backed securities
- Commodities (ex precious metal)
- Agricultural
- Energies
- Non-precious metals
- Equity-like hedge funds
- Equity neutral
- FX carry
- Fixed income relative value
- Short volatility
Bonds
- Traditional bonds
- Developed
- Emerging
- Regions
- Countries
- Type
- Maturity and credit
Bond-like alternatives
- Private debt
- Peer-to-peer lending
- Infrastructure, real assets and asset backed securities
- Hedge funds with long bias in bonds
Genuine alternatives
- Standalone, managed futures
- Insurance-like
- Safe haven currencies
- Precious metal