1. REALITY 1 – Goals are stochastic (e.g., pension liabilities) – and not “Background Risk”, “Habit” or “KUJ” or deterministic as in CAPM
2. REALITY 2- Investors have multiple stochastic goals (retirement, kid’s education, post-retirement health) and not just 1.
3. RELATIVITY 1 – Investors maximize goal-relative risk-adjusted returns – and not “Epstein-Zin” utility functions! or additive utility functions.
4. RELATIVITY 2 – They hire agents/ #assetmanagers to manage portfolios (delegation at many levels – a Board to an investment team; the team to asset managers – passive or active)
5. REALITY/RELATIVITY 3 – They want (hopefully) skillful agents – largely ignored in the literature. So can’t use #Sharpe ratios but must use #Mcube.
6. REALITY 4 – They specify risk through an absolute volatility and a target #trackingerror in their #investment Policy Statements – and not some random/arbitrary “risk aversion” parameter.
REALITY 5 – An effective asset pricing model should also provide consistent #assetallocation and risk-adjusted performance measures to be useful – only #capm does this; 99% of other asset pricing models fail this test (e.g., APT ).
By
DR. ARUN MURALIDHAR
Journal of Investment Consulting
Journal of Investment Management
Journal of Portfolio Management
Financial Analysts Journal
Investments and Pensions Europe
Investments and Wealth Monitor
Pensions and Investments
CIO Magazine
Markets Group
Retirement Management Journal
Journal of Financial Perspectives
Realitivity in Finance 