Every year, thousands of financial professionals converge on the CFA Institute Annual Conference for a deeper understanding of the financial landscape and the opportunity to connect with industry thought leaders.
Whether or not you were on-site for the 72nd CFA Institute Annual Conference from May 15 to 17, the session topics offered a great framework for better understanding the financial world in 2019. Taking place in London, the conference featured keynotes with noted economists, best-selling authors, leading researchers and successful practitioners.
This year the content focused on disruptive events like technological innovation, globalization, and demographic shifts. With the topic of "Disruption" in mind, here’s a rundown of related content from some of the CFA Charterholders at FactSet.
Risk
Turbulence Adjusted Risk: Applications for Asset Allocation and Selection
Observations of financial markets have shown that while many financial risk models rely on the assumption of normal return distributions, financial instruments can exhibit extremely non-normal behavior, even in supposedly calm markets. The relevance of new measures for market calmness, or lack thereof, is emerging as we see the new “normal” regime turning more to increased market volatility and turbulence.
In this article, Alyx Flournoy, CFA , proposes an analytical approach that can help investment managers account for risks created by volatility.
Indexing
Thematic Indexing 2.0: A Systematic Approach to Finding Relatedness in Markets
Most of us use Google every day for work and for leisure, and it rarely disappoints. The algorithm powering this search engine is amazingly effective at finding relatedness between the searched topics and relevant online contents. In fact, almost all digital content is now being classified, analyzed, and surfaced to users based on this concept of relatedness.
What if thematic investing happened in the same way?
Jeremy Zhou, CFA, looks at how indexing is evolving to support investor preferences.
Wealth
What Ultra High Net Worth Clients Want from Wealth Managers
For the most valued clients—the ultra high net worth, with over $10 million in investable assets—high quality information has never been so important. Our recent research shows those at the upper end of the wealth curve are increasingly risk averse and actively seeking detailed insights about their investments.
Greg King, CFA, explains how advisors will need to share portfolio data more often and demonstrate secure technology to attract these clients.
Economics
What Would a Transfer of Power from Baby Boomers to Generation X Look Like?
According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, Generation X (Americans born between 1965 and 1981) numbered around 66 million in 2015, putting them behind both the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) with 75.4 million and millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) with 83.1 million in size.
Given the size of the age cohort, baby boomers have dominated American culture for decades, and today they hold a larger percentage of corporate and governmental leadership positions than any other generation.
Here, Sara Potter, CFA discusses what the economic impacts of a transition of power from baby boomers to Generation X could look like.
Insurance
ESG Considerations in the Insurance Space
It is generally accepted that the insurance business revolves around the aggregation, management, and transference of risk. This is true whether we are thinking about the risk aggregation and transference inherent in the diversifying characteristics of a pool of insured individuals or if we are viewing a block of ceded reinsurance business in isolation.
But there are other risks that insurers implicitly onboard when they are trying to align assets and liabilities through the investment management process.
In this article, Pat Reilly, CFA, discusses how ESG factors specifically impact that investment management process.