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In finance, an investment strategy is a set of rules, behaviors or procedures, designed to guide an investor's selection of an investment portfolio. Individuals have different profit objectives, and their individual skills make different tactics and strategies appropriate. Some choices involve a tradeoff between risk and return. Most investors fall somewhere in between, accepting some risk for the expectation of higher returns. Investors frequently pick investments to hedge themselves against inflation. During periods of high inflation investments such as shares tend to perform less well in real terms. Time horizon of investments. Investments such as shares should be invested into with the time frame of a minimum of 5 years in mind. It is recommended in finance a minimum of 6 months to 12 months expenses in a rainy-day current account, giving instant access before investing in riskier investments than an instant access account. It is also recommended no more than 90% of your money in non-instant access shares. Unexpected expenses can happen. If someone does not have an income an income can be created by using share income funds. No strategy: Investors who don't have a strategy have been called Sheep. Arbitrary choices modeled on throwing darts at a page (referencing earlier decades when stock prices were listed daily in the newspapers) have been called Blind Folded Monkeys Throwing Darts [no source]. This famous test had debatable outcomes. Active vs Passive: Passive strategies like buy and hold and passive indexing are often used to minimize transaction costs. Passive investors don't believe it is possible to time the market. Active strategies such as momentum trading are an attempt to outperform benchmark indexes. Active investors believe they have the better than average skills. Momentum Trading: One strategy is to select investments based on their recent past performance. Stocks that had higher returns for the recent 3 to 12 months tend to continue to perform better for the next few months compared to the stocks that had lower returns for the recent 3 to 12 months.

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Investment strategy

Asset allocation

Asset allocation is the implementation of an investment strategy that attempts to balance risk versus reward by adjusting the percentage of each asset in an investment portfolio according to the investor's risk tolerance, goals and investment time frame. The focus is on the characteristics of the overall portfolio. Such a strategy contrasts with an approach that focuses on individual assets. Many financial experts argue that asset allocation is an important factor in determining returns for an investment portfolio.

Value investing

Value investing is an investment that involves buying securities that appear underpriced by some form of fundamental analysis. The various forms of value investing derive from the investment philosophy first taught by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School in 1928, and subsequently developed in their 1934 text Security Analysis. The early value opportunities identified by Graham and Dodd included stock in public companies trading at discounts to book value or tangible book value, those with high dividend yields, and those having low price-to-earning multiples, or low price-to-book ratios.

Investment timing, debt structure, and financing constraints

Michi Nishihara

We introduce debt issuance limit constraints along with market debt and bank debt to consider how financial frictions affect investment, financing, and debt structure strategies. Our model provides four important results. First, a firm is more likely to issue market debt than bank debt when its debt issuance limit increases. Second, investment strategies are nonmonotonic with respect to debt issuance limits. Third, debt issuance limits distort the relationship between a firm's equity value and investment strategy. Finally, debt issuance limit constraints lead to debt holders experiencing low risk and low returns. That is, the more severe the debt issuance limits are, the lower are the credit spreads and default probabilities. Our theoretical results are consistent with stylized facts and empirical results. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elsevier Science Bv2015

Modern Portfolio Theory Revisited

David Sébastien Morton de Lachapelle

In the first place the behavior of (online) traders on markets is analyzed and modeled, and it is shown that the average investor behaves as a mean-variance optimizer in finance. Within this description, transaction costs play a key role in explaining observed investment patterns and in particular an important uncovered relation between average investment and portfolio value. As online investors take into account transaction costs in their investment strategy, they are also sensitive to high portfolio rebalancing costs. Solutions to avoid high portfolio turnovers are investigated: first in the one-dimensional case, where it is shown that estimators with minimal-dispersion improve both the accuracy and the variance of volatility and Value-at-Risk forecasts; second, in a multi-asset environment where the ideal covariance matrix must have good conditioning properties to maintain reasonable portfolio turnover. Theoretical results are derived using Random Matrix Theory, as for instance an equation for the Stieltjes transform of the eigenvalue density of i.i.d. correlation matrices with general time-decreasing weight profiles. Results found in the one-dimensional case are generalized leading to long-memory covariance matrices. Finally, a "curse of dimensionality" in portfolio allocation is tackled by generalizing the Spectral Coarse Graining, a method of reduction for complex networks, that is extended to the simplification of the mean-variance optimization problem.

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