Each individual investor is different, with different financial goals,
different levels of risk tolerance and different personal preferences. From the
point of view of investment management, these characteristics are often defined
as objectives and constraints. Objectives can be the type of return being
sought, while constraints include factors such as time horizon, how liquid the
investor is, any personal tax situation and how risk is handled. It's really a
balancing act between risk and return with each investor having unique
requirements, as well as a unique financial outlook - essentially a constrained
utility maximization objective. To analyze how well a customer fits into a
particular investor class, one investment house has even designed a structured
questionnaire with about two-dozen questions that each has to be answered with
values from 1 to 5. The questions range from personal background (age, marital
state, number of children, job type, education type, etc.) to what the customer
expects from an investment (capital protection, tax shelter, liquid assets,
etc.). A fuzzy logic system has been designed for the evaluation of the answers
to the above questions. We have investigated the notion of fuzziness with
respect to funds allocation.Comment: 21 page
