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Lecture

Investment Strategies Overview

In course

MGT-301: Foundations in financial economics

The aim of this course is to expose EPFL bachelor students to some of the main areas in financial economics. The course will be organized around six themes. Students will obtain both practical insights through real-world examples and understand how one can ...

Description

This lecture provides an overview of different types of investors, such as mutual funds, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds, and discusses the importance of investment decisions for individuals. It covers topics like asset allocation, risk management, and the concept of risk premium in financial markets.

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Instructors (3)

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

RUEDIGER FAHLENBRACH is Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Formerly on the faculty of the Fisher College of Business of the Ohio State University (USA), he holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton). He holds a senior research chair from the Swiss Finance Institute, and is research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). He has research interests in empirical corporate finance, in particular corporate governance and entrepreneurship. Ruediger Fahlenbrach has published in the leading academic journals in finance, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Ruediger currently serves a three year term as elected director of the European Finance Association (2018-2020). He is Associate Editor of the Review of Finance, and former associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Financial Management. His research has been reported in many large-circulation newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Le Temps, NZZ, Handelsblatt, Forbes Magazine, USA Today, and Fortune Magazine.

Julien Hugonnier

Pierre Collin-Dufresne

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Business

Finance: Investment management

Related concepts (28)

Fund of funds

A "fund of funds" (FOF) is an investment strategy of holding a portfolio of other investment funds rather than investing directly in stocks, bonds or other securities. This type of investing is often referred to as multi-manager investment. A fund of funds may be "fettered", meaning that it invests only in funds managed by the same investment company, or "unfettered", meaning that it can invest in external funds run by other managers.

Investment fund

An investment fund is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group such as reducing the risks of the investment by a significant percentage. These advantages include an ability to: hire professional investment managers, who may offer better returns and more adequate risk management; benefit from economies of scale, i.e., lower transaction costs; increase the asset diversification to reduce some unsystematic risk.

Investment

Investment is traditionally defined as the "commitment of resources to achieve later benefits". If an investment involves money, then it can be defined as a "commitment of money to receive more money later". From a broader viewpoint, an investment can be defined as "to tailor the pattern of expenditure and receipt of resources to optimise the desirable patterns of these flows". When expenditure and receipts are defined in terms of money, then the net monetary receipt in a time period is termed as cash flow, while money received in a series of several time periods is termed as cash flow stream.

Sovereign wealth fund

A sovereign wealth fund (SWF), sovereign investment fund, or social wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity fund or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by revenues from commodity exports or from foreign-exchange reserves held by the central bank.

Investment strategy

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.

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