• Gain in depth knowledge of key asset allocation and investment policy strategies including fixed income strategies and alternatives
• Learn useful roles for derivatives in asset allocation planning and implementation
• Understand the effect of trading costs on investment performance and how to measure them
• Learn how to place portfolio construction into the macroeconomic context

• Tactical asset allocation and models of market timing
• Dynamic models of asset allocation including investment policies designed to deliver payoffs that meet the needs of investors whose risk tolerance changes with their wealth level
• Risk budgeting and use of value at risk in the portfolio construction process
• The nonlinear risk-return tradeoff in portfolios that use alternative investments and options and how they might affect standard portfolio performance measures

• Usefulness and appropriateness of hedge funds and similar investments in institutional and individual investor portfolios
• Performance measurement
• Manager incentives and compensation
• Existence and measurement of styles and style drift in relation to absolute return strategies

• Understand your personal approach to ethical decision making
• Refine an effective and actionable template usable to navigate the ethical quagmire in which the consultant is often placed
• Recognize how one’s corporate culture facilitates/impedes the individual’s ability to respond ethically to current business challenges

• Learn the mechanics of equity lending
• Understand potential profits and costs associated with practices at institutional and individual levels

• Use of duration to manage a bond portfolio and evaluate performance
• Convexity – why does it matter?
• Using yields to understand future performance of a bond

• Integrating options strategies with traditional asset allocation
• Dynamic asset allocation with options strategies
• Costs and benefits to futures overlays in the implementation of asset allocation decisions

• Understand how interest rates, bond prices, corporate earnings, and stock prices move throughout the business cycle, through recessions and booms
• Analyze how and why financial markets respond to macro data

• Learn the differences between private equity and public equity investing and the impacts of these differences to investors
• Understand the private equity landscape
• Hear about recent trends and changes in marketplace

• Description of internal and external components of institutional trade costs
• Analysis of the determinants of trade costs
• Implications of trade cost analysis for portfolio manager behavior

Prerequisites:
The Investment Strategist Certificate Program is open to CIMA^® and CIMC^® designees in good standing.

Continuing Education:
This program is approved for 40 hours of IMCA CE credit including two ethics hours and 30 CFP^® continuing education credits.

IMCA is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be addressed to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 150 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 700, Nashville, TN, 37219-2417. Web site: www.nasba.org. The recommended CPE for the Investment Strategist Certificate Program is 30 credits. For more information on NASBA standards, click here.

Please note that this is a certificate program and successful completion does not result in a designation.

For more information about the IMCA Investment Strategist program, please contact IMCA at 303.770.3377.