Foundations of Investment Management: Mastering Financial Markets, Asset Classes, and Investment Strategies

Foundations of Investment Management: Mastering Financial Markets, Asset Classes, and Investment Strategies shows how to navigate today’s world of complex financial instruments, investment opportunities, and devastating pitfalls. This reader-friendly guide details stocks, bonds, and alternative investments, who invests in these asset classes, how, and why. It uses real-world examples in addition to citing the latest academic research. Additionally, seven industry experts have co-authored select chapters to greatly expand the depth and utility of this book for the reader. This unique guide is perfect for financial analysts, portfolio managers, client-facing representatives, product specialists, and anybody early in their finance career who wishes to understand how clients, products, and investors relate and interact.

Foundations of Investment Management provides a complete overview of the investment management industry; defines key terms and participants; identifies investment vehicles, strategies, and asset classes; and analyzes each strategy focusing on its relative utility and potential inclusion in a well-diversified portfolio. Despite the subject mater’s complexity, each topic is distilled in a way that is highly relatable and intuitive, ensuring the reader knows how to better manage their investments or interact with clients. Lastly, every chapter closes with a summary and investment implications to maximize the information presented.

Key Features

• Defines various fund structures, discusses the growth of the mutual fund industry, explains the benefits and disadvantages of comingled vehicles and details other investment options including fund of funds, annuities, and separately managed accounts
• Presents detailed descriptions of different institutional investors; elaborates on their investment considerations, objectives, and reaction functions; and concludes with implications for an institutions’ propensity to respond similarly to market developments
• Supplies tools and techniques to construct and optimize a fixed income portfolio
• Reviews the history of the Bank of England and U.S. Federal Reserve and describes central bank objectives, tools, and reaction functions
• Illustrates the difference between investing and speculating by introducing different valuation methods and approaches to developing an investment thesis
• Examines the growth of high frequency trading and identifies rebalancing strategies
• Identifies different stock investment approaches as well as introduces several equity valuation methods
• Describes mean variance optimization and conviction-based portfolio construction approaches
• Reviews bond basics including bond income, interest rate sensitivity, and sources of risk such as credit and liquidity
• Examines the history of real assets, defines each real asset, details the drivers of their return, and explains how an investor may gain exposure to each asset through the utilization of financial instruments or investment vehicles
• Presents the theory behind and history of factors and factor investing from both an academic and practitioner perspective.
• Presents the development of our understanding of behavioral biases, explains how these biases impact investment decisions, and provides tips and techniques to avoid their pitfalls