Return of the Active Manager: How to Apply Behavioral Finance to Renew and Improve Investment Management

Emotional behavior and biases run throughout financial markets. This is the diagnosis of behavioral finance.

But it is not enough to know that investors make biased decisions. What do we do about it? How do we move beyond diagnosis, to prescription?

In this groundbreaking new book, investing and behavioural finance experts Thomas Howard and Jason A. Voss plug this void and show the new way ahead for investment managers and advisors. Return of the Active Manager provides a set of tools for investment professionals to overcome and take advantage of behavioral biases.

Across seven compelling chapters, Return of the Active Manager details actionable advice on topics such as behaviourally-enhanced fundamental analysis, active equity fund evaluation and selection, harnessing big data, and investment firm structure. You learn how to exploit behavioural price distortions, how to recognise and avoid behavioural biases (in both yourself and clients), how to extract behavioral insights from the executives of prospective investments, and how manager behaviour can be used to predict future fund performance.

An indispensable tool, Return of the Active Manager rationalises the financial markets and prescribes actionable strategies that build on the lessons of behavioural finance.

Dr. Howard is co-founder of AthenaInvest, a Greenwood Village-based SEC Registered Investment Advisor. He led the research project that resulted in Strategy Based Investing, the methodology which underlies AthenaInvest's investment approach. He oversees Athena's ongoing research, which has led to a number of industry publications and conference presentations. Dr. Howard currently serves as CEO, Director of Research, and Chief Investment Officer at Athena.

Dr. Howard is a Professor Emeritus at the Reiman School of Finance, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, where for over 30 years he taught courses and published articles in the areas of investment management and international finance. For many years he presented stock analysis seminars throughout the US for the American Association of Individual Investors, a national investment education organization headquartered in Chicago. Dr. Howard has been a guest lecturer at SDA Bocconi, Italy's leading business school and at Handelsho/jskole Syd in Denmark and was a 2004 Summer lecturer in international finance at EM Lyon in France.

He consulted with a number of firms, most recently First Data Corp and Janus Capital Group, and served for 10 years on the Board of Directors for AMG National Trust Bank N.A., a financial counseling and investment management firm headquartered in Denver.

After receiving his BS in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Idaho, Dr. Howard worked three years for Proctor Gamble as a production and warehouse manager. He then entered Oregon State University where he received an MS in Management Science after which he received a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Washington.