Smart Portfolios: A practical guide to building and maintaining intelligent investment portfolios

Smart Portfolios is about building and maintaining smart investment portfolios. At its heart are the three key questions every investor needs to answer:

1. What to invest in.
2. How much to invest.
3. When to make changes to a portfolio.

Author Robert Carver addresses these three areas by providing a single integrated approach to portfolio management. He shows how to follow a step-by-step process to build a multi-asset investment portfolio, and how to rebalance the portfolio efficiently. He covers both investment in collective funds like ETFs, and also direct investment in individual equities.

Important features include:

-- Why forecasting future returns is so difficult, and how to account for uncertainty when making investment decisions.
-- How to accurately calculate the true costs of an investment, including costs that you may not even be aware of.
-- How to select the best ETF for each asset class.
-- How to compare the costs and other features of different ETFs.
-- How to select individual shares.
-- Calculating the number of shares needed for adequate diversification.
-- How to use systematic forecasting algorithms to adjust portfolio allocations.
-- How to cut trading costs through smart rebalancing strategies and execution tactics.

Robert Carver also explains how to blend assets with different levels of risk, and how to construct portfolios that suit the level of risk that the investor can cope with.

Smart Portfolios is detailed, comprehensive, and full of practical methods, rules of thumb and techniques, all fully explained with examples. It is intended for professional investors worldwide, including financial advisors, private bankers, wealth managers and institutional funds; as well as experienced private investors.

Robert Carver is an independent trader and bestselling author, with nearly thirty years of trading experience. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and a research advisor for Stylus Digital; a hedge fund trading cryptocurrencies. Rob is also engaged as a consultant on an undisclosed basis by several other institutional trading firms.

Rob's career in finance began at Barclays investment bank where he traded exotic derivative products. Subsequently, he worked as a portfolio manager for AHL – one of the world's largest hedge funds – before, during, and after the global financial meltdown of 2008. He was responsible for the creation of AHL’s fundamental global macro strategy, and subsequently managed the fund's multi billion dollar fixed income portfolio.

Rob has Bachelors and Masters degrees in Economics, and is the author of four previous books published by Harriman House including Advanced Futures Trading Strategies, Leveraged Trading, Systematic Trading, and The Art and Science of Trading. He trades his own portfolio using the techniques you can find in his books.