Technology Asset Management
Technology Asset Management refers to the over-arching beliefs of the investment organisation. For example, does the manager buy growth or value shares (and why)? In the USA and the UK, two of the world's most sophisticated fund management markets, the tradition is for institutions to manage client money relative to benchmarks. It is thus possible that successful active managers (measured before tax) may produce miserable after-tax results. Whereas US firms generally cater to shareholders, Japanese businesses generally exhibit a stakeholder mentality, in which they seek consensus amongst all interested parties. So always seek advice before doing any offshore asset investing. Above-average fund performance appears to be dependent on the unique skills of the fund manager; however, clients are loath to stake their investments on the ability of a few individuals- they would rather see firm-wide success, attributable to a single philosophy and internal discipline.
The largest tecnology asset management firms are those that exhibit all the complexity their size demands. The Asia-Pacific region has shown the strongest growth in recent years. Apart from the people who bring in the money (marketers) and the people who direct investment (the fund managers), there are compliance staff (to ensure accord with legislative and regulatory constraints), internal auditors of various kinds (to examine internal systems and controls), financial controllers (to account for the institutions' own money and costs), computer experts, and "back office" employees (to track and record transactions and fund valuations for up to thousands of clients per institution). There are a range of different styles of fund management an institution can implement to suit your needs. The specialist performance measurement firms calculate quartile and decile data and close attention would be paid to the (percentile) ranking of any fund.
Portfolio alpha is obtained by measuring the difference between the return of the portfolio and that of a benchmark portfolio. Technology asset management goals are achieved by your future asset management team working closely together. If the team has changed greatly (high staff turnover or changes to the team), then arguably the performance record is completely unrelated to the existing team (of fund managers). The term asset management is often used to refer to the investment management of collective investments, whilst the more generic fund management may refer to all forms of institutional investment as well as investment management for private investors. The USA is a litigious society and shareholders use the law as a lever to pressure management teams. The theory of portfolio diversification was originated by Markowitz and effective diversification requires management of the correlation between the asset returns and the liability returns, issues internal to the portfolio (individual holdings volatility), and cross-correlations between the returns.
For people with aspirations of getting into technology asset management, further education may be needed beyond a bachelors in business, finance, or economics. A most important factor when choosing your asset management team is: How long has the team been working together? Countries such as China and India offer huge potential and many companies are showing an increased focus in this region. How does your asset management decide what to buy and when? How does the manager decide what to sell and when? Who takes the decisions and are they taken by committee? What controls are in place to ensure that a rogue fund (one very different from others and from what is intended) cannot arise? All these questions need to be asked by your asset management team beofre you consider putting them in place. Sometimes it seems the smaller the firm the better the chance of good performance, this is due to the close attention that can be given to your funds.