Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least

Summary

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns provides an evidence-based blueprint for successful investing when decades of market tailwinds are turning into headwinds.

For a generation, falling yields and soaring asset prices have boosted realized returns. However, this past windfall leaves retirement savers and investors now facing the prospect of record-low future expected returns. Emphasizing this pressing challenge, the book highlights the role that timeless investment practices—discipline, humility, and patience—will play in enabling investment success. It then assesses current investor practices and the body of empirical evidence to illuminate the building blocks for improving long-run returns in today's environment and beyond. It concludes by reviewing how to put them together through effective portfolio construction, risk management, and cost control practices.

In this book, listeners will also find: the common investor responses so far to the low expected return challenge; extensive empirical evidence on the critical ingredients of an effective portfolio: major asset class premia, illiquidity premia, style premia, and alpha; discussions of the pros and cons of illiquid investments, factor investing, ESG investing, risk mitigation strategies, and market timing; and coverage of the whole top-down investment process.