Risk reduction and diversification in UK commercial property portfolios

The issue of diversification in direct real estate investment portfolios has been one of the most widely studied topics in academic and practitioner literature. Most work, however, has been done using mean returns and risks for broad market segments as inputs to asset allocation models, or in a few cases using data from small sets of individual properties. This paper reports results from a comprehensive testing of asset allocation modelling drawing on records of 10,000+ UK properties tracked by Investment Property Databank. It provides for the first time robust estimates of the diversification gains attainable given return, risk and cross-correlations across individual properties actually available to fund managers. The discussion of results covers implications for the number of assets and amount of money needed to construct “balanced” portfolios by direct investment, or via indirect specialist vehicles.Publisher PD

Intent Models for Contextualising and Diversifying Query Suggestions

The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many candidate queries with the same prefix can be removed as redundant. Secondly, the suggestions can also be personalised based on the user's context. These two directions to improve the aforementioned mechanisms' quality can be in opposition: while the latter aims to promote suggestions that address search intents that a user is likely to have, the former aims to diversify the suggestions to cover as many intents as possible. We introduce a contextualisation framework that utilises a short-term context using the user's behaviour within the current search session, such as the previous query, the documents examined, and the candidate query suggestions that the user has discarded. This short-term context is used to contextualise and diversify the ranking of query suggestions, by modelling the user's information need as a mixture of intent-specific user models. The evaluation is performed offline on a set of approximately 1.0M test user sessions. Our results suggest that the proposed approach significantly improves query suggestions compared to the baseline approach.Comment: A short version of this paper was presented at CIKM 201

The Adoption of Specialized High School Financial Literacy Curriculum Modules

This article explores the implementation of sophisticated financial literacy teaching materials developed specifically for a high school audience in a high technology environment. Considerable research has been devoted to understanding both the general reasons that innovation does or does not get adopted by the target population and the specific aspects of implementation of new curriculum materials at the high school level. Recent work evaluating successes and failures in the implementation of new curricula for foreign languages, mathematics, physics and general science is reviewed in order to draw inferences that may assist in an implementation program for financial literacy modules. Questions of the following types are addressed: Are there risks to the teacher in adopting novel curricula? Does extensive professional development need to accompany new curriculum adoption? Are there psychological hurdles that teachers need to address before adoption? Are there institutional impediments? How does teacher work environment affect adoption?

Individual Investors and Portfolio Diversification in Late Victorian Britain: How Diversified Were Victorian Financial Portfolios?

This article investigates Victorian investor financial portfolio strategies in England and Wales during the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that investors held on average about half of their gross wealth in the form of four or five liquid financial securities, but were reluctant to adopt fully contemporary financial advice to invest equal amounts in securities or to spread risk across the globe. They generally held under-diversified portfolios and proximity to their investments may have been an alternative to diversification as a means of risk reduction, especially for the less wealthy