Stephen Campisi offered workshop attendees comprehensive insights into portfolio management

CFA Society Finland was pleased to welcome Stephen Campisi, CFA, Managing Director, The Pensar Group, to speak about his globally acknowledged research at an event that gathered members and candidates to hear how to dig deeper into portfolio management analysis. The workshop was held at Church House, Kirkon Eläkerahasto in Helsinki, with our board member Joonas Huttunen, CFA hosting the event. Mr. Campisi visited also the Swedish and Danish CFA Societies during his tour in Europe.

The presentation consisted of three different parts giving insights into how one can analyse the success and performance of a portfolio and thus better create value to one’s customers, asset owners and employers. The goal was to find more practical, hands-on methods to measure the success of an investment portfolio.

Topics in the first part, “Quant Challenge” gave a reminder on the importance of knowing the math behind portfolio metrics; How to calculate statistics such as information ratio, tracking error, risk attribution and alpha directionality with seemingly few starting data. Campisi gave examples with specific mathematical formulas and illustrations that every portfolio manager is better off with.

Second part was titled “Fund Analysis in a Portfolio Context”. Campisi gave insight on how to better assess active managers as part of the aggregate portfolio and how to assess their contribution to risk as well as other portfolio statistics. Looking at active managers should be ultimately done on a portfolio basis and even seemingly worse performing managers can play a role in the total portfolio due to diversification benefits.

The final part concentrated on “Evaluating Benchmark Misfit Risk”, a debut presentation for the Scandinavian CFA Societies. Here Campisi offered methods and tools on how to assess and measure the possible benchmark misfit risk, which arises for example when the manager's style of investing has structural differences to the benchmark.

Mr. Campisi’s visit in Europe included also visits to the Swedish and Danish CFA Societies. We thank him for presenting ideas on how to better define and explain portfolio success and bring value to both investors and investment professionals.

You can watch the recording of the presentation here.