Investors worldwide are caught between a desire to achieve greater investment returns and an aversion to taking risk. To help individuals overcome these traditional investment challenges, Natixis Global Asset Management today announced a commitment to fund a three-year, $1 million research project at the MIT focused on investor behavior...

Under the CIFRE plan (industrial contracts for training through research), Koris International launches a research program in Behavioral Finance through a PhD entitled "Behavioral Finance Approach for Risk Assessment in Quantitative Portfolio Management”, conducted by the PhD student Maxime Bonelli.

New research suggests that rather than staying cold-bloodied and rational the top fund managers use emotion to choose which stocks to buy.

According to Bruno Mathis from SterWen and Jean Delahousse, all institutions exposed on Lehman which have highly developed credit analysis tools are able to detect warning signs as soon as they come about and would have almost four months to take safety measures (CDS netting, security transfers, deleting credit line, etc.)

Few managers can both stay away of short-selling and reassess themselves sharply when prices are excessively low, and above all no one can make it happen every time. In these volatile and shocked markets, timing is key but difficult to master.