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Secondary investments in private equity can be an attractive addition to primary private equity investments. They offer broad diversification across vintage years, industries, geographies, managers and investment strategies. Generally, capital is deployed faster than with primary commitments, reducing the time that commitments are held in reserve, and they have shorter life cycles than primary funds.

Over the past few years, investors have been keenly drawn to strategies that promise to lower equity portfolio risk. This article examines one popular low-risk strategy, minimum variance, which optimizes a basket of stocks to deliver the lowest possible portfolio variance.

There is no perfect system or framework for investing, nor can any investor follow any system in a perfectly disciplined way. Goals-based investing, however, is a better approach than most in helping investors stick to their investment diet, reach their target and maintain their financial “weight” over time.

The framework uses multiple dimensions of risk and return trade-offs to consider when building portfolios and evaluates the consequences of risk allocation decisions during normal and stressed markets.

By moving beyond traditional measures of investment return and applying a benchmark to gauge the performance of an allocation, investors can determine whether: the selection of various asset classes in the allocation outperformed the broad market, any allocation decisions in the portfolio need to be reviewed, and a long-term decision made in the portfolio is having a short-term effect.

Investors are bombarded by a variety of investment strategies and alternatives from an ever-growing and increasingly complex financial industry, each claiming to improve returns and reduce risk. Amid the clamor, academic and practitioner research has sifted through the vast landscape and found four intuitive investment strategies that, when applied effectively, have delivered positive long-term returns with low correlation across a multitude of asset classes, markets, and time periods using very liquid securities.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wooed voters by promising to end its decades-long economic and market malaise with the three arrows of Abenomics: fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reform. Abe quickly launched the first arrow by passing fiscal stimulus of roughly 2% of GDP. The Bank of Japan subsequently fired the second arrow by announcing a 2% CPI inflation target and more quantitative easing. This paper discusses why the authors believe the third and most important arrow - deep structural reform - will disappoint investors and drive Japanese equit

Regardless of the project scope, knowing the parties and defining parameters are essential to a successful relationship. Investors and developers alike should do their homework, protect themselves and have confidence in the structure of the deal.

The world is witnessing a major rebalancing of economic power. Once dominated by the G7 nations, it is today making room for a new and expanding set of rapidly growing economies. The citizens of emerging market countries, while comparatively poor on a per capita GDP basis, are being helped out of poverty by astounding rates of domestic economic growth. For some of the larger developing economies such as China and India, economic progress has catapulted them to a plane where they are able to compete side-by-side with the wealthiest and most advanced nations of the world.

In this edition of Eton's quarterly newsletter, they discuss goals-based investing from the highly personal and conceptual processes of goal definition and prioritization featured in past issues to the important process of marrying the investor’s goals with his investment portfolio. The report includes a quarterly economic and market outlook by Jean Brunel.