Recent volatility illustrates how the markets truly are “human institutions” and shows the impact of emotional crowds. Listen in to explore the effect of investor behavior on active equity returns and discover ways to generate alpha by restructuring various aspects of investment management using behavioral factors. Learn proven techniques from manager selection, to security analysis, to portfolio management.

Behavioral finance is sweeping through the financial services industry. Financial advisors are the furthest along, introducing these concepts into their practices, including needs-based planning, outsourcing non-core activities such as investment management, and creating a reassuring behavioral experience for clients.

We are witnessing a dramatic flow of money out of active equity mutual funds and a similarly sized flow into index funds. A large portion of these outflows are from so-called closet indexers, funds that claim to be active equity managers but, upon closer inspection, closely track an index while charging active fees. Investors have wised up to this and are heading for the exits, moving into much lower-fee passive funds that provide the same underlying equity return.

Join AthenaInvest’s C. Thomas Howard, PhD, CEO and Chief Investment Officer, and Steve Bogosian, Director of Sales, to explore the effect of investor behavior on the equity markets and how the Athena Global Tactical EFTs portfolio harnesses crowd behavior to enhance portfolio performance.

Emotional behavior and biases run throughout financial markets. This is the diagnosis of behavioral finance. But it is not enough to know that investors make biased decisions. What do we do about it? How do we move beyond diagnosis, to prescription?

The widely accepted style grid of market capitalization and price-to-earnings ratios was largely arbitrary in design, lacking substantial research or academic foundation. An alternative framework based on how managers actually manage their portfolios and organizing around those investment strategies provides a superior alternative for organizing and comparing funds.