Investment Strategies and Portfolio Analysis

Overview

Class Central Tips

In this course, you will learn about latest investment strategies and performance evaluation. You will start by learning portfolio performance measures and discuss best practices in portfolio performance evaluation. You will explore different evaluation techniques such as style analysis and attribution analysis and apply them to evaluate different investment strategies. Special emphasis will be given to recent financial market innovations and current investment trends. After this course, learners will be able to: • Describe performance measurement measures • Evaluate portfolio performance • Describe and contrast different investment strategies • Propose investment strategy solutions

Syllabus

Performance measurement and benchmarking

In this module, we focus on the central problem of performance measurement: how do you assess the increase in your wealth over a given period and evaluate the risk that was involved? In this module, you will learn how to calculate different return and risk measures and how you use these measures to evaluate a portfolio’s performance relative to a benchmark.

Active vs. passive investing: Risk-adjusted return measures

In this module, we focus on constructing return-to-risk measures in order to compare investments in terms of their desirability. You are going to learn several different ways to calculate risk-adjusted return measures for an actively managed fund and understand how these measures differ from each other.

Performance evaluation: Style analysis and performance attribution

In this module, you are going to learn to use two analytical tools that are widely used in practice to evaluate what the portfolio performance can be attributed to. You will first learn about style analysis. Then, you will learn about attribution analysis, which has become a crucial component in internal evaluation system of investment managers and institutional clients in the industry. Focus will be placed on the practical applications.