Advanced Portfolio Management: A Quant's Guide for Fundamental Investors

Advanced Portfolio Management is an unusually well-written, concise, and worthwhile addition to my collection of quantitative investing books. Strongly recommended.I’ve been a quantitative PM and Researcher for nearly a decade and have read many books and journal articles on quantitative portfolio management. I’ve gotten increasingly interested in the merging of quant and fundamental/discretionary approaches over the past couple of years. When I saw this book was due to be released, I pre-ordered (something I almost never do). I was delighted when it appeared on my doorstep earlier this week.Initially I was a bit taken aback at how thin the book was (just shy of 200 pages). Less than 200 pages to explain quantitative investing?!?!? As I began reading, I quickly realized brevity was a great strength. As Blaise Pascal quipped "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” Most others on the subject are notoriously long and dense, but then how many copies of Grinold/Kahn have actually been read cover to cover?The book does a particularly good job of presenting the quantitative concepts very clearly *and then* providing practical heuristics for applying those concepts to a fundamental PM’s book (e.g., position sizing heuristic).The author presents the range of approaches to a given topics (e.g., risk targeting) and then offers his clear recommendation about the “best” (most practical). I also like that it re-emphasizes and summarizes the key takeaway messages in a way that makes it easy to digest, making equations and deeper discussion available to those interested. Finally, he writes with enough wit to make it enjoyable.Bottom line, a great primer for fundamental PMs or “quant-curious” folks and probably worthwhile for pure quants who will probably pick up some new ways to think about familiar subjects.

Great book that writes down on paper the secret incantations that are usually passed down verbally via apprenticeship in the field. Nothing written here is particularly secret or novel in the world of quantitative finance but finally outsiders are invited in! Note, I know the author so this review may or may not be biased. That is an exercise for the reader of this review to determine.

While this is indeed a book on Portfolio Management, it is not "Advanced". However, it introduces the basic fundamentals of quantitative portfolio management in a clear and enjoyable way. The author does not insult your intelligence, but no advanced mathematics is required to absorb the majority of the book.This book focuses largely on the practical matter of performing certain computations, but without much statistical context to evaluate the results. For example, one might expect a book on advanced portfolio management would talk about, say, comparing two factor models using statistical techniques, the effects of autocorrelation, or how to deal with outliers, etc. You will find that kind of statistical content lacking here.I would also warn readers that the sizing heuristic of Insight 6.2 is dubious from first principles, and likely to lead to suboptimal outcomes. The impact is probably small, but I would recommend a "trust but verify" approach to any critical advice you take away from the book. (Though you'll have to look elsewhere to learn about backtesting, I'm afraid.)

This is a very interesting book that explains how to construct portfolios more rationally and evaluate a portfolio manager’s performance using the metric of Information Ratio. The book has a good mix of textual descriptions and math formulas. Thanks for the author’s generous sharing.

Author shares key concepts from many years of experience practicing portfolio risk management in a concise and entertaining fashion. Until now, these were closely guarded secrets by some of the world’s greatest practitioners

This is a nicely written book. It is probably the best book I have read on factor models and their use in practice for risk management or alpha research. However, the biggest issue with this book is that significant fraction of the mathematical formulas is wrong, e.g., check c~ or eps above eqn 11.3. Or, does eqn. 11.9 make any sense as t goes to infinity?

The book was simply not read through even once.The primary worked example in Section 3.4, for example, incorrectly says that $25.5M times 1.4% is 36K (it's $357K) but then proceeds to use this mistake again, repeatedly, getting to a massively too small value for portfolio vol. (i.e., it's not just a typo, it's an error - and may lead to erroneous inferences and intuition building, namely that this portfolio of beta 1 is dominated by idio vol, when, if you did the math correctly, you'd find it dominated by market vol instead). There are others, but that one sticks out.A careful reader has to waste time verifying that the errors are the author's, rather than their own, which hampers readability and motivation, especially when aimed at beginner / fundamental readers.

This book overpromises and under-delivers. It does not offer practical solutions, and it is neither rigorous nor advanced. Save your money, and buy something else.