Week 4: Investment in practice – practices, styles, history and performance

Welcome back everyone and welcome to Week 4 of Managing my Investments. I’m Martin Upton of The Open University’s True Potential Centre. Last week we looked at the factors you need to take into account when devising your investment strategy. We also looked at how professional investors apply the theories to their decision-making. This week, we first review many of the common strategies that can be adopted when compiling your investment portfolio. We then move on to the key issue of how to assess the performance of investments and those that manage them on your behalf. We also look at the data on the historical performance of different classes of investments and find out which have performed the best over the past century. We complete the week by examining a number of recent historical investment episodes that have attracted public interest. We examine these within the context of the theories about investment management that you have studied so far. The emphasis is on understanding how investment management proceeds in practice and on how we can learn lessons from investment issues that have surfaced in the recent past. So enjoy Week 4!