Rose Mary Cosio is the Executive Director at UBS Wealth Management in New York, NY. Javier Estrada is a Professor of Finance at IESE Business School & partner and financial advisor at SGCI in Barcelona, Spain. Mark Kritzman is the CEO and Founding Partner at Windham Capital Management in Boston, MA. nThe Applied Finance Conference has become an annual event in which academics and practitioners converge to discuss issues of interest to both. On May 15, the 2015 meeting took place at the new facilities of St. John’s University in downtown New York. One of the two practitioner-oriented panels of the conference, ‘New Frontiers in Portfolio Management,’ dealt with current trends affecting the practice of portfolio management. The panelists, in the same order as they presented, were Rose Mary Cosio, Executive Director, Ultra High Net-Worth Clients, UBS Wealth Management; Javier Estrada, Professor of Finance, IESE Business School, and partner and financial advisor, Sport Global Consulting Investments (SGCI); and Mark Kritzman, Founding Partner and CEO, Windham Capital Management. This brief article summarizes the main issues discussed in the panel for readers of the Journal of Applied Finance. It does not aim to give a comprehensive view of the issues addressed during the one-hour session; rather, it merely aims to briefly condense the main arguments put forth by the panelists.
The price-to-book (PB) ratio is a measure of the relative value that the market places on a share of stock. We have estimated an empirical equation of two stages that explain about 62% of the variation in annual PB levels for the S&P 500 companies from the year 2000 to 2009. We explored the market’s ability to anticipate changes in performance and found that the market price appears to reflect anticipatory information not present in the model value. This paper both advances understanding of PB’s determinants and provides a tool for managers who wish to enhance their firm’s PB.
