EDHEC European Investment Practices Survey

Its aim is to give an account of the current practices in the industry and to contrast these practices with the recent state of the art in the investment literature. The survey results are based on a questionnaire that elicited more than two hundred responses from throughout Europe. We address topics from four central areas of investment management practice: risk and asset allocation, indices and benchmarks, asset-liability management, and performance measurement. The questionnaire is fairly general and focuses on broad aspects and on broad classifications of approaches rather than on technical details. Our analysis of the responses shows that in practice there is a considerable diversity of methods and tools. Overall, however, the results provide evidence that many institutions, rather than fully exploiting the improved techniques that research has made readily available to them, currently settle for the most straightforward.