2017 NAAIM Founders Award Winner Franklin Parker Shows How Using Active Allocation is the Best Way to Achieve Your Goals
Littleton, CO – April 10, 2017 – The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) announced today that Franklin Parker is the 2017 first-place winner of the NAAIM Founders Award for Advances in Active Investment Management for his paper “Achieve Your Goals More Often: A Case for Active Allocation”.
In its ninth year, the NAAIM Founders Award is a research competition that draws entries from all over the world in the areas of computational finance, advanced algorithms, tactical investment management techniques, strategic investment strategies and numerous other topics, all designed to further our knowledge of the active investing world.
The competition is open to anyone involved in financial services including academic faculty, researchers and graduate students, investment advisors, analysts and other financial professionals.
Patrick Beaudan, the Chairman of the Award Committee, writes “In his winning paper, Franklin Parker takes common portfolio management components and turns them into an practical approach to achieving more efficient portfolio management.” Beaudan holds a Ph.D from Stanford and is CEO of Emotomy.
Parker proposes using a goals-based optimization strategy, coupled with an active allocation approach to deliver higher probabilities of goal-achievement. Rather than fight the efficiency of markets, Parker proposes harnessing that efficiency, and shows how such an approach may also be used to deliver more efficient portfolios than the traditional buy-and-hold approach.
Through this independent study, Franklin Parker proposes incorporating implied volatility and the US Treasury yield curve structure into portfolio optimization to create a dynamic active allocation approach. “In the end,” says Parker, “what I care about most is helping people and institutions get done what they want to get done. Hopefully, this research pushes that effort forward.” Read the Abstract
A panel of investment professionals selected by the NAAIM Founders Award committee reviewed entries and awarded the winner. The criteria used in judging the papers are: practical significance to practitioners of active investing; quality of exposition; analytical rigor; and novelty of results. In addition to Beaudan, the panel included Bill Barack of Lindisfarne Investments LLC; Jeff Pietsch of Concert Capital Management; David Shaw of Hg Capital Advisors; Henry Bee of Cassia; John Kosar of Asbury Research; and Spencer Seggebruch of RT Jones Capital Equities Management. To find out more about the judges’ panel, follow this link: https://www.naaim.org/programs/founders-award/wagner-award-judging-team/
The 2017 NAAIM Founders Award received 18 entries this year from the United States but also from Italy, Uzbekistan and Austria.
The 2017 NAAIM Founders Award research papers will be available to the public after May 4. Up to three papers can be requested using a search feature on the NAAIM website. Users will be able to search for papers by competition year and/or keyword such as the author’s name. To access the search tool, follow this link https://www.naaim.org/programs/find-a-whitepaper/ or visit the NAAIM website and select “Find A Whitepaper” under the Programs tab at the top.
First Place winner Franklin Parker will be presenting his winning paper at NAAIM’s 2017 national conference Uncommon Knowledge, April 30 – May 3 in San Diego, California. For more information or to register for the annual conference, visit the NAAIM website https://www.naaim.org/events/uncommon-knowledge-national-conference/
About the Winner
Franklin is the chief investment officer with Bright Wealth Management in Lewisville, Texas. In this role, he is responsible for all aspects of research, portfolio management, economic updates and capital market assumptions for the firm. As a practitioner-researcher, he is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers, trade publications, a speaker at various industry events (both in the US and abroad). He was the market strategist for the 90.9 KCBI news team in Dallas for many years. Franklin attended the University of North Texas where he graduated cum laude and was a Minnie Stevens Piper Scholar and a Board of Regents scholar. Though raised on the family cattle ranch in Central Texas, Franklin, his wife, and children, now call North Dallas their home.
About the NAAIM Founders Award
The NAAIM Founders Award for Advances in Active Investment Management annually sponsors the Founders Award whitepaper competition to foster thought and innovation in active investment management research. The public can request up to three copies of previous whitepapers using the Find A Whitepaper search tool on the NAAIM website. Contact NAAIM for more information. The NAAIM Founders Award competition was previously known as the NAAIM Wagner Award.
The top prize in 2016 went to Spencer Seggebruch of RT Jones Capital Equities Management for his revisionist paper “Multivariate Regression Analysis: Considering the Relevance of Past Performance.”
About NAAIM
The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) is a non-profit trade group of nearly 200 Registered Investment Advisors and Investment Advisor Representatives that collectively manage over $38 billion in assets. NAAIM members provide active money management services to their clients to produce favorable risk-adjusted returns as an alternative to more passive, buy-and-hold investment strategies. NAAIM publishes the weekly NAAIM Exposure Index, and sponsors the annual Uncommon Knowledge conference along with smaller conferences and regional workshops on managing portfolios, trading techniques for various instruments and markets, regulation and compliance, and other topics of interest to its membership. For more information, visit www.naaim.org.
