Stephen J. Huxley, Ph.D., and J. Brent Burns (San Francisco, CA) are founding partners of Asset Dedication, L.L.C. Dr. Huxley, a registered investment adviser, is a professor of decision sciences at the University of San Francisco.

The breakthrough technique that outperforms asset allocation--and takes your portfolio to the next level

Over the past two decades, asset allocation has become the holy grail of investment techniques. Experts championed it, brokers and financial planners sold it, clients bought it, and few questioned the wisdom of trying to squeeze widely varying investors and their financial goals into prefabricated "one size fits all" allocation formulas.

Problem is, asset allocation has significant flaws in the way it is used today, especially for personal investors. Asset Dedication exposes these flaws, corrects them, and propels investors and advisors into the next generation of personal investing. This revolutionary book introduces asset dedication, an investment program based on the latest techniques in modern financial management technology that will allow you to:

• Improve a portfolio's performance by constructing a seven-step, personalized asset dedication program
• Design financial strategies tailored to fit the three investing phases of life--accumulation, distribution, and transfer
• Build a flexible but passive set-it-and-forget-it portfolio that matches or exceeds actively managed portfolios without high fees and "loads"

The time is long past for the shortcomings of asset allocation to be revealed and repaired. Asset Dedication shows how to build a personalized portfolio, one that has been proven through extensive backtesting to consistently outperform asset allocation and meet your financial wants and needs over both the short- and long-term.

"New ideas often take a long time to replace old ideas. The purpose of this book is to introduce a new idea: asset dedication. It is a strategy that works. The evidence is here."--From Chapter 1

To anyone who has taken the time to look, it has become clear that asset allocation has severe drawbacks. Chief among those is the focus on applying static, set-in-stone formulas to a narrow range of "model" portfolios and forcing a wide range of investors to follow them. This may help brokers to quickly pigeonhole investors into pre-set allocation models with their generic, impersonal formulas, but fails to provide truly customized portfolios. Meeting the widely varying needs, resources, and goals of individual investors precisely and safely is exactly where asset allocation falls short, and reveals its own fundamental flaws.

Asset Dedication breaks the monopoly that asset allocation has held over individual investors. It provides a rationale for why each dollar is invested in stocks, bonds, or cash and how to dedicate the precise amount in each asset class to do the job it does best--no more, no less:

• Just enough cash to meet emergency needs
• Just enough in bonds to provide sufficient and steady income
• Everything else in stocks for long-term growth

Asset dedication represents the first major shift in investment strategy since the popularization of asset allocation in the 1980s. Historical comparisons show that it achieves better performance than the traditional and often arbitrary fixed-formula asset allocation approach.

Asset allocation is about to replaced by a new technique that promises to shift the ways in which investors at every level, especially retirees, approach their investment decisions. Asset Dedication introduces you to this focused new approach, shows how to break the stranglehold that asset allocation holds on your portfolio, and helps you, once and for all, to become the master of your current and future financial success.