3rd Quarter (2015)

Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) Burton G. Malkiel More than 10,000 Baby Boomers will be reaching retirement age every year from now through 2030. Inadequate savings, high cost and poorly designed retirement plans as well as investor behavioral mistakes combine to level most of them woefully unprepared for retirement. The paper suggests a number of… Read more

Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) David Blake, Alberto Rossi, Allan Timmermann, Ian Tonks and Russ Wermers The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify… Read more

Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) Anureet Saxena and Robert A. Stubbs Construction of optimized portfolios entails a complex interaction between three key entities, namely, the risk factors, the alpha factors and the constraints. The problems that arise due to mutual misalignment between these three entities are collectively referred to as Factor Alignment Problems (FAP). Examples… Read more

Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) Henk Berkman, Paul D. Koch and P. Joakim Westerholm Guardians behind underaged accounts are successful at picking stocks. These informed traders tend to channel their best trades through the accounts of children, especially when they trade just before major earnings announcements, large price changes, and takeover announcements. Building on these… Read more

Volume 13, Number 3, (2015) Craig William French We examine whether the value of active investment management can exceed its cost, and find that it can, by a substantial margin. We consider the 0.67% average cost estimate in French (2008), comparing it with the expected value of a known active investment strategy. For a “passive”… Read more