Portfolio & Strategy
Building portfolios, choosing strategies, and the vehicles to do it.
A pile of good ideas is not a portfolio, and this topic covers the work of turning holdings into a coherent whole.
It starts with diversification and the correlation math that makes it work, then moves through Modern Portfolio Theory and the investment styles, value and growth among them, that shape how capital is deployed.
The vehicles to do it sit alongside, from ETFs to mutual funds, with sustainable and ESG options included.
Investing With Purpose connects the theory to real position sizes and real costs.
The aim is a process: a way to combine assets, choose a strategy, and pick the instruments that express it, built on evidence rather than instinct.
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Diversification is the practice of spreading capital across many assets so that the failure of any single one does not…
Modern Portfolio Theory is the framework Harry Markowitz introduced in 1952 for choosing a portfolio based on the joint…
Value investing is the practice of buying securities for less than you think they are worth. The discipline traces back…
Growth investing is the strategy of buying companies whose revenue, earnings, and cash flow are expanding faster than…
An exchange-traded fund, or ETF, is a pooled investment vehicle whose shares trade on a stock exchange throughout the…
An annuity is a contract with an insurance company in which you pay a premium, either as a lump sum or over time, and…
More in Portfolio & Strategy
A mutual fund is a pooled investment vehicle that takes money from many investors, buys a portfolio of securities, and…
The expense ratio is the annual cost of owning a mutual fund or ETF, stated as a percentage of assets. It is deducted…
A fixed annuity is the simplest type of annuity contract. The insurance company guarantees a set interest rate on your…
Life insurance exists to replace income for the people who depend on you. Some policies also build a savings component…
Exchange-traded funds and mutual funds both pool investors' money into a single diversified portfolio. The difference…
Every exchange-traded fund shares the same plumbing: a basket of assets that trades on an exchange like a single stock.…
Both structures pool investor money and hold a professionally managed portfolio, but they differ in one decisive way:…
A money market fund and a high-yield savings account both promise a competitive yield on cash you want to keep safe and…
Two ETFs can track the exact same index and hold the exact same stocks, yet treat the dividends those stocks pay in…
Correlation measures how closely two assets move together. It runs from minus one to plus one and is the single most…
Growth and value are the two oldest styles of stock selection. Growth investors pay up for companies expected to expand…
Every fund you can buy sits somewhere on a single spectrum: it either tries to beat a market benchmark or it tries to…
Creation and redemption is the behind-the-scenes process that lets ETFs track the value of their underlying holdings…
An ETF's market price and its net asset value (NAV) are two different numbers. When the market price is higher, the ETF…
A closed-end fund (CEF) is a registered investment company that issues a fixed number of shares in an initial public…
A SPAC is a publicly traded shell company that raises cash in an IPO with the sole purpose of buying a private business…
A Business Development Company is a publicly traded fund that lends to, and sometimes invests in, small and mid-sized…
A Master Limited Partnership is a publicly traded partnership, most often in energy infrastructure, that passes its…
A target-date fund is a single fund that holds a diversified mix of stocks and bonds and gradually shifts toward bonds…
A structured note is a debt security whose payoff is tied to an underlying index, stock, basket, or rate rather than a…
A money market fund is a mutual fund that invests in short-duration, high-quality debt so it can aim for a stable share…
A leveraged ETF aims to deliver a multiple (2x or 3x) of a benchmark's **daily** return. An inverse ETF aims to deliver…
The same mutual fund can be sold under several "share classes," each with a different fee structure. Class A, Class B,…
Every ETF trade happens in one of two places. The **primary market** is where authorized participants create and redeem…