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Analyse top-down active strategies, setting out their logic and how they are carried out

CFA® Level III · Portfolio Management Pathway · Active Equity Investing: Strategies · L3.PM.2.c

The idea

Top-down managers begin with macroeconomic and market views and translate them into exposures. Views on growth, inflation, interest rates, currencies and policy drive decisions on country and currency allocation, sector rotation, style (value against growth, large against small) and themes such as demographic or technological change. The rationale is that broad macro forces explain much of the variation in stock returns, so getting the big exposures right adds value. The process runs from macro forecasts to relative attractiveness of markets or sectors to position sizing. The trap is low breadth: a handful of large, correlated macro bets means a single wrong call can dominate results, and consistent timing is hard.

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