Looking for a weighty investment topic?

Do you write -- or hire people to write -- about investment topics? Do the following situations apply to you:

• Looking for a topic to cover in your next white paper or quarterly investment report or letter
  
• Feel as if you've covered all of the old standards -- asset allocation, risk vs. reward, the rewards of international investing and so on and so forth -- in your writing
• Have a great topic, but your firm's compliance department won't let you write anything, unless you provide written documentation

The CFA Institute's publications can spark good ideas for your writing AND provide the documentation that will help you move your communication through your firm's compliance department. I particularly enjoyed CFA Magazine's themed issues on hedge funds (July/August 2005) and alpha (September/October 2005). Many of their articles come with suggestions for further reading -- in other words, more documentation to throw at Compliance.

Even leafing through the relatively arcane CFA Digest's November issue, I found some juicy topics. For example:

• "The Active Management Premium in Small-Cap U.S. Equities" -- According to the abstracter, "... the author suggests that the small-cap U.S. equity market holds a lot of opportunity for investors seeking to allocate active management risk."
• "Long-Term Global Market Correlations" -- "The authors find that the benefits of diversification rely increasingly on exposure to emerging markets."
• "Relative Value of Emerging Markets Debt" -- "The authors conclude there is no reason to believe that EMD [emerging market debt] and corporate bonds with the same rating have markedly different credit quality."

Couldn't you start an interesting conversation on any of these topics with a client who's sophisticated enough?

To gain complete online access to the CFA Institute's publications, you need to be a CFA Institute member or buy a subscription to the publications you want.