Smart Portfolios : A practical guide to building and maintaining intelligent investment portfolios / Robert Carver.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carver, Robert, 1811-1863, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Investments--Management.

Investments.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (451 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

La Vergne : Harriman House, 2017.

Summary:

Smart Portfolios is about building and maintaining smart investment portfolios. At its heart are the three key questions every investor needs to answer:1. What to invest in.2. How much to invest.3. When to make changes to a portfolio.Author Robert Carver addresses these three areas by providing a single integrated approach to portfolio management. He shows how to follow a step-by-step process to build a multi-asset investment portfolio, and how to rebalance the portfolio efficiently. He covers both investment in collective funds like ETFs, and also direct investment in individual equities.Important features include:-- Why forecasting future returns is so difficult, and how to account for uncertainty when making investment decisions.-- How to accurately calculate the true costs of an investment, including costs that you may not even be aware of.-- How to select the best ETF for each asset class.-- How to compare the costs and other features of different ETFs.-- How to select individual shares.-- Calculating the number of shares needed for adequate diversification.-- How to use systematic forecasting algorithms to adjust portfolio allocations.-- How to cut trading costs through smart rebalancing strategies and execution tactics.Robert Carver also explains how to blend assets with different levels of risk, and how to construct portfolios that suit the level of risk that the investor can cope with. Smart Portfolios is detailed, comprehensive, and full of practical methods, rules of thumb and techniques, all fully explained with examples. It is intended for professional investors worldwide, including financial advisors, private bankers, wealth managers and institutional funds; as well as experienced private investors.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

About the author

Note about this eBook edition

Preface

Who should read this book

Finding your way around

What's in this book

Introduction

Investing today

Why this book?

Is this book still relevant?

Prologue: What do we know?

What we probably don't know: future average returns

What we probably know: similarity and risk

What we definitely know: costs

What we might, perhaps know: forecasting returns

Part One: Theory of Smart Portfolios

Chapter One: What is the Best Portfolio?

Chapter overview

Geometric mean return

Expectations

Risk and investment horizon

Costs

Real returns

Embarrassment: absolute returns versus relative returns

Currency

A purely financial judgement

Key points

Chapter Two: Uncertainty and Investment

The investment game

Statistical modelling

The uncertain past

Chapter Three: Trying to Find the Best Portfolio

Portfolio optimisation, made simple

Uncertain returns and unstable portfolios

Why the future won't be like the past

Chapter Four: Simple, Smart, and Safe Methods to find the Best Portfolio (Without Costs)

Dealing with different risk appetites

Risk weighting

The handcrafting method

Some practical issues with portfolio allocation

Chapter Five: Smart Thinking About Costs

Why costs are important

Cost measurement

How to compare the costs of different ETFs

How much does it cost to diversify an ETF portfolio?

A warning about cost comparisons

Smart tactics for reducing costs

Chapter Six: The Unknown Benefits and Known Costs of Diversification

Diversification: What is it good for?

Should you diversify?.

The different costs of ETFs and individual shares

Handcrafting, equal weighting, or market cap weighting?

Buy the whole index, or just part of it?

The smartest way to invest in a given country

Does diversifying by buying multiple funds make sense?

Part Two: Creating Smart Portfolios

Chapter Seven: A Top-Down Approach to Building Smart Portfolios

Why is top-down smart?

The top-down portfolio

The road map

Issues to consider

Chapter Eight: Asset Classes

Which asset classes?

What division of asset classes?

What appetite for risk?

The smart way to weight asset classes

How should smaller investors weight their portfolio and get exposure to asset classes?

Summary

Chapter Nine: Alternatives

Different groups of alternatives

Genuine alternatives

Equity-like alternatives

Bond-like alternatives

Alternative assets for ETF investors

Chapter Ten: Equities Across Countries

How to structure an equity portfolio

My framework for top-down allocation in equities

Chapter Eleven: Equities Within Countries

Allocating to sectors within a country

Allocating to individual equities within sectors

Ethical investment

Chapter Twelve: Bonds

The world of bonds

How to get exposure to bonds

How to weight bonds - in theory

Weighting bonds for US investors

Weighting bonds for UK investors

Chapter Thirteen: Putting It All Together

Example 1: Sarah - US institutional investor

Example 2: David - UK investor with £500,000

Example 3: Paul - US investor with 40,000

Example 4: Patricia - UK investor with £50,000

Part Three: Predicting Returns.

Chapter Fourteen: Predicting Returns and Selecting Assets

Why predicting risk-adjusted returns is so difficult

How can we use smart forecasting models to construct portfolios?

Introducing two smart forecasting models

Using forecasting models in a top-down handcrafted portfolio

Adjusting portfolio weights when you don't have a model

Stock selection when you don't have a model

Chapter Fifteen: Are Active Fund Managers Really Geniuses? And is Smart Beta Really Smart?

Active fund managers

Smart beta

Robo advisors

Part Four: Smart Rebalancing

Chapter Sixteen: The Theory of Rebalancing

Why do you need to rebalance?

Is it worth reweighting and by how much?

When to substitute and when not to

Tax considerations

Chapter Seventeen: Portfolio Maintenance

Annual review

Reacting to external events

Periodic portfolio reweighting

Tax implications of portfolio maintenance

Rebalancing example

Chapter Eighteen: Portfolio Repair

What is portfolio repair?

A six-step plan for portfolio repair

Some practical points on repair

Portfolio repair example

Epilogue

Glossary

Appendices

Appendix A: Resources

Further reading

Websites

Appendix B: Cost and Return Statistics

Trading costs

Standard deviations

Correlations

Appendix C: Technical Stuff

Aggregate returns

Standard deviation

Geometric means, standard deviations, and Sharpe Ratio

Gaussian distributions

Bootstrapping and sampling distributions

Portfolio optimisation

Forecasting models

Acknowledgements

Reference

Investor types and recommended portfolios

Minimum investments

Choosing ETFs.

Information for weighting.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780857195722

0857195727