This week, Zacks Chief Equity Strategist and Economist John Blank, PhD discusses:

• More on the Zacks approach to asset allocation in 2024. John writes the Zacks Monthly Investing Update and Asset Allocation report, and this is the second part of his series on this critical topic. In this week’s webinar, he focuses on the concepts of risk and return in building asset allocations. The slides he presents in both webinars are essential to understanding these concepts, and John tells viewers how to get these slides and charts for free from Zacks.

• John begins by defining the various types of risk and return and, importantly, key measures of portfolio returns and risks including Information Coefficient, Information Ratio, Sortino and Sharpe Ratios, Skewness and Kurtosis, and others. John also outlines types of broad risk (natural events, economy, politics, etc.) as well as important investing concepts including the Efficient Frontier, Capital Market Line (CML) and Capital Allocation Line (CAL).

• John then reviews the returns for the family of Zacks ETF Model Portfolios. He presents the annual returns by class, correlation coefficient matrix, and variance-covariance matrix, as well as charts detailing monthly returns since 2010 for various weights in hypothetical portfolios. Don’t miss this expert review of risk and return factors in the asset allocation process from one of the industry’s leading strategists!