Asset Allocation Techniques and Financial Market Timing

A highly readable, logically presented, unique guide to asset allocation strategies and technical analysis, this work covers numerous investment alternatives including mutual funds and fixed income securities. Aby and Vaughn provide a comprehensive examination of point and figure charting and vertical bar analysis, combined with an approach that both improves timing and emphasizes the minimization of errors in data interpretation and investment decision making. The authors discuss ways to estimate price targets and provide unique forecasting methods for fixed-income and aggregate equity markets, using an intermarket perspective. This is an important and useful resource for professionals and other knowledgeable investors.

Throughout the book, Aby and Vaughn challenge conventional and acceptable academic thinking. Through emphasis on smaller, more obscure capitalization issues, they reduce complex concepts to a highly readable framework pervaded by comprehensive coverages of a large number of investment options. Major topics featured include the illustration and application of critical concepts underlying vertical bar chart analysis; extensive coverage on contemporary strategies that improve timing and challenge past criticisms of point and figure charting; a unique approach utilizing the point and figure charts to reveal how mutual fund selection can be improved; and intermarket technical analysis, a method through which movements in bond prices and yields are predicted.

CARROLL D. ABY, JR., is the N.B. Morrison Professor of Applied Management and Professor of Finance at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He has held investment broker positions with Merrill Lynch, A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc., and Paine Webber, and is currently consulting in the field of investment management, financial valuation, personal financial planning, and on other related matters. He is also an investment columnist and author of numerous scholarly articles and 10 books.

DONALD E. VAUGHN is Professor of Finance at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. A CPA and author of eight books, including a leading textbook on investment, he gained national recognition through a series of small business profiles which he published under the auspices of the U.S. Government. He is actively engaged in research and publishes frequently in the major investment and accounting journals.