Investment Strategies

Overview & Synopsis

Investment strategies relate to an extensive range of aspects and have attracted the attention of investors and students, academics, researchers, financial executives, portfolio managers, security analysts, financial engineers, practitioners, including at the level of Nobel prizes (Tobin, 1981, for the analysis of financial markets; Markowitz, Sharpe, 1990, for modern portfolio models; Black, Scholes, Merton, 1997, for option pricing; Akerlof, Stiglitz, Spence, 2001, for markets with asymmetric information). Even common people talk daily about investments, investment tactics and strategies, and how to obtain success. In the absence of an investment philosophy, they try to copy celebrities or professional advisors without understanding the mechanics of markets, their core beliefs, strengths, or weaknesses. Beyond the traditional stocks and bonds, there are many other types of assets and alternative investments, and investors are overwhelmed by the huge number of portfolio architecture and management options. Regardless of the types of investors, portfolios are no longer a simple list of assets, and their management requires impressive skills. Decision models have significantly evolved from the Markowitz portfolio model toward capital market paradigms in the context of managing unrealistic assumptions or adding the treatment of market imperfections, multiperiod objectives, and transaction costs. The index of portfolio risk provides an intuitive image of diversification. There is an interest in the integration of new visions in investment strategies: determinism, complexity, nonlinearity, self-organization and chaos, trading rules, evolutionary games, real-options games and artificial markets, bounded rationality, heterogeneous agents, and behavioral investments. From the evolutionary perspective, investors interpret information by encoding and categorization, trying to simplify the strategies by using rules of thumb and heuristics. The present work contributes to the understanding of current investment processes by offering the tactical and strategic elements specific to global markets as well as emerging ones in a multilayer approach useful to decision-makers, investors, students, and researchers in the field.