PlanPlus President Wins Prestigious Award

Online, October 26, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The AFS is an organization primarily composed of academicians and those with an academic interest whose mission is to encourage basic and applied research in the area of personal financial planning and financial services; the development of the curricula in the financial services field at the university level; and encourage interaction between financial services professionals and academicians.

"It is very gratifying to receive this recognition from the AFS" said Shawn Brayman. "I am a passionate believer in the role of objective research in raising the bar of professionalism for financial planners worldwide. Organizations like the AFS and the FPSC Foundation in Canada play a critical role in this effort."

This year's AFS meeting included 75 presentations covering all areas of financial planning by professors and others from as far away as New Zealand. Brayman's paper focused on a topic of central concern in the evolution of approaches to suitability assessment of investment portfolios - the issue of risk capacity.

"Researchers and recently regulators have become aware of the need to differentiate between sub-factors in accessing a client's risk profile such as risk tolerance, time horizon and other portfolio objectives", said Brayman. "Risk tolerance is a psychological trait and can be measured with psychometric tests. The challenge now is that we bandy about words like risk capacity the same as we used to talk about risk tolerance without understanding it. What I have tried to address in this paper is an objective definition and measure of risk capacity that allows us to go beyond simple measure like a pass-fail score from Monte Carlo simulations to an overall measure of the downside impact on a client and how it can be mitigated by, not only portfolio decisions, but goal based considerations."