Welcome to What is Asset Management. Your one-stop shop for everything you need to know about Asset Management Tools , Free Asset Management Software, Financial Asset Management Systems, Wealth Management Firms, Wealth Management jobs, Capital Asset Management Software, Computer Asset Management software, and Asset Management  Database.

So What is Asset Management?  To put it simply, it’s the management of securities and assets to meet certain investment objectives.  Often time bulge bracket firms break the Asset Management industry into two groups: Investment Management and Private Wealth Management.  Investment management firms and divisions deal with managing larger, institutional capital, which can range upwards from greater than $50million  to billions and even trillion of dollar portfolios.  These come from entities such as super high networth individuals and families, pension funds, and  governments.  Private Wealth Management firms and divisions deal with high networth individuals that fall below that but above a firm-determined minimum amount of networth.

Let’s dig a little deeper by looking deeper into the two sides of an Investment Bank to get a better view of what is asset management. We’ll dig deeper into this in our wealth management firms section.

A standalone investment bank is an investment brokerage firm that executes and advises complicated financial transactions as well as manages assets for mainly large institutions and high networth individuals.  An investment bank is split into two divisions, the Sell Side (which handle the more well-known areas of banking such as Sales and Trading, Initial Price Offerings (IPOS), and the Capital Markets and the Buy Side (which handles the management of assets through in vehicles such as Equity Securities, Debt Securities, Cash, and Alternative Investments (Hedge Funds, Infrastructure Funds, Real Estate Funds, Private Equity Funds, etc).

So the Buy Side of the business is where we’ll be concentrating on this website.  Using asset management tools such as computer asset management software and financial asset management systems, Portfolio Managers perform what is called asset allocation based upon the portfolio’s investment objective.  What this means is they place a certain amount of money into different areas (asset classes) based upon how much expected return they want from the investment portfolio.  This is an important and highly quantitative-driven decision since each investment carries a different amount of risk in it.   Generally, riskier assets can offer higher returns, but at a much more risky costs.  For example, a portfolio that is more focused solely on equities and hedge fund pools would be seen as more risky than one focus on government bonds and cash.  Different clients will have different objectives and returns they’d like to meet.  For example, a teacher’s pension fund may be more comfortable taking less risk in their investments while a young, high-networth individual may be more comfortable to take larger risks. It’s important for wealth management firms and portfolio managers to take time to understand their clients, then use both computer asset management software and intuition to determine a proper allocation.

That’s as far as we’ll go with this introduction.  Take time to explore this site to for good insight on what is asset management and tools for the industry.