Understanding Portfolio Tilting
The main aspect one has to comprehend vis-à-vis portfolio tilting, is making decisions without emotion on investments. The next step is to develop an accurate understanding of the two principal types of investment: passive and active fund management. Passive management – a.k.a. index tracking – is when one choose an index like the NYSE and then programs a computer to replicate it. It then buys and sells derivatives which are used to ensure the portfolio stays as close to the original as possible.
Then there is active management. This is a total 180 degree turn from passive management. Fund managers work hard to seek out new investment opportunities in the market to steer their portfolios in the direction of profits, via a set of earlier-established rules and guides that are affected by the set characteristics of the different investments. The other way of doing this is by looking at how a trust deed establishes what is okay for investment and what is not.
Now we get to the portfolio tilting part. These two examples above are completely antithetical to each other. What happens in the middle is a third – and increasingly popular – style of money management. The tilted portfolio is thus an index tracker boasting a small amount of active management – in other words, a combination of the two ideas.