Managing Your Investment Portfolio For Dummies - UK, UK Edition

Achieve positive returns on your investments, in any market

With Managing Your Investment Portfolio FD you can build and manage a portfolio of investments that?s flexible enough to provide positive returns, no matter what the market is doing. Inside you?ll find a wealth of strategies and techniques to help you take your investments to the next level. Lean to track and predict volatility; hedge your exposure by going long and short; use strategies like arbitrage, relative value and pairs trading; and dip into distressed assets, options, derivatives, spread betting and much more.

Techniques and strategies covered include:

• Tracking and predicting volatility, and making short-term gains on very volatile markets
• Hedging exposure and going long and short
• Arbitrage (taking advantage of price differences between markets)
• Pairs trading
• Relative value strategies
• Distressed assets (things written off by the mainstream that may have long-term value)
• Earnings surprises (looking for companies delivering better earnings than predicted by analysts)
• Options and derivatives
• Macro trading (looking at key indicators for economic cycles)

Part I: It’s All about Portfolios 7

Chapter 1: Introducing Great Opportunities for Advanced Investors 9

Chapter 2: Assessing Risk: Deciding What Kind of Investor You Are 25

Part II: Picking the Strategies for You 43

Chapter 3: Grasping Basic Hedge-Fund Strategies 45

Chapter 4: Dealing with Volatility and Economic Cycles 63

Chapter 5: Digging Deeper into Alternative Assets: Commodities and Currencies 91

Chapter 6: Assessing the Hedge-Fund Industry: Don’t Believe the Hype 111

Part III: Thinking and Acting Like a Hedgie: Simple Strategies You Can Employ Yourself  129

Chapter 7: Selling What You Don’t Own: Short Selling 131

Chapter 8: Understanding Arbitrage: Big Name, Simple Idea 149

Chapter 9: Weighing Up Growth Versus Value Investing 165

Chapter 10: Gearing up to Use Leverage 187

Chapter 11: Stepping into Structured Investments 197

Chapter 12: Benefitting from Shareholder Activism 211

Part IV: Delving into More Specialist Techniques (with a Little Help) 229

Chapter 13: Advanced Investing in Commodities: Sharks and Rocket Scientists 231

Chapter 14: Investing in Emerging-Market Equities and Currencies 253

Chapter 15: Investing Macro Style: Seeing the Big Picture 269

Part V: Tools of the Trade: Useful Instruments 295

Chapter 16: Following Indices: Exchange-Traded Funds and Other Trackers 297

Chapter 17: Taking a Punt on the Financial Markets 325

Part VI: The Part of Tens 339

Chapter 18: Ten Top Tips to Protect Your Stash 341

Chapter 19: Ten Hedge-Fund Style Techniques to Grow Your Wealth 347

Index 353

David Stevenson is a columnist for the Financial Times where he writes the Adventurous Investor section. He is also a columnist for Investors Chronicle and author of Investing in Shares For Dummies, UK edition.