Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation : Comprehensive Approaches to Managing Risk and Optimizing Returns Hardcover - 2006 - 1st Edition

Take advantage of advanced investing strategies to strengthen your portfolios

Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation focuses on the knowledge and nuances that will help you achieve asset allocation success. Asset allocation authority David Darst builds upon his bestselling The Art of Asset Allocation to explore every aspect of asset allocation from foundations through correlations, providing you with detailed techniques for understanding and implementing asset allocation in any portfolio.

Valuable for professional advisors as well as sophisticated individual investors, Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation features proven techniques to:

• Accurately estimate correlations between asset classes in a variety of market environments
• Recognize cyclical and secular turning points in pricing and valuation to optimize portfolio re-weighting
• Structure financial plans, personal trusts, and annuity programs to minimize taxes and better manage liability

Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation takes you well beyond time horizon, risk tolerance, and desired return to detail new thinking and tools on asset classes, correlations, information management, and more. It provides you with the industry's most comprehensive and results-oriented exploration of why asset allocation works and how to apply it to achieve superior short- and long-term returns for your clients.

Maximize risk-adjusted return in every economic environment

Successful asset allocation requires much more than a "one from column A, two from column B" approach. Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation integrates investor needs, market principles, and asset characteristics to help you truly understand asset allocation and use it to construct flexible portfolios that are easily adaptable to all financial and market conditions.

Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation focuses on the inner workings of asset allocation, giving you a solid foundation in:

• Asset allocation principles and tools, and how they are often used and abused
• Techniques for gaining the most advantage from compound interest
• Performance of major asset classes to help you determine historical patterns of returns, likelihood of deviations, and potential ranges for future performance
• Correlations of returns between equities, fixed income securities, and alternative investments as well as 16 specific asset classes
• Fundamental, valuation, and psychological/technical/liquidity forces that are the new indicators of market turning points
• Comprehensive listing of Internet and media information resources for locating relevant case studies, background notes, articles, books, and more

Since college and university endowments are excellent examples of balancing the creative and the conservative when investing in multiple asset classes, the investment programs of Harvard University and Yale University are detailed. Rare strategic insights are provided into the policy, implementation, diversification, and risk management techniques that have helped them become and remain two of America's largest endowments, strategies that can be adapted and replicated in portfolios of any size.

Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation spotlights every aspect of asset allocation today. Rich in both theory and application, it will provide you with a thorough grounding in the hands-on specifics required to understand and apply the science of contemporary asset allocation along with the insight, skill, and judgment required for true mastery of its less tangible elements.