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This article explores the questions and options that should be examined in designing an optimal investment program for a Generation Skipping Trust (GST).

The authors discuss Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) - what purpose they serve, why demand for ETFs has grown, and the author's position on the use of these products. Also covered are how ETFs have evolved in recent years, examination of their risks and consideration of some unintended consequences that may result from their design that have implications for the market as a whole.

This article discusses the different roles an investment consultant plays in providing services to your foundation:Investment Partner Fidicuary Advisor Educator Administrator, andPhilanthropic SupporterA checklist of questions to ask a prospective investment consultant is provided.

As part of the "10 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Your Foundation" series, four approaches to impact investing are discussed:Community InvestingSocially Responsible InvestingProgram-Related InvestingSocial Venture Capital Investing

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.