The Fourth Quarter issue of 2020 opens with the third in a series of retrospective pieces: “Seventy-Five Years of Investing for Future Generations,” by David Chambers, Elroy Dimson, and Charikleia Kaffe.

This issue features two further Perspectives pieces. In the first, Kenechukwu Anadu, CFA, Mathias Kruttli, Patrick McCabe, and Emilio Osambela examine “The Shift from Active to Passive Investing: Risks to Financial Stability?" Our second Perspectives piece, “Impact Investing: Killing Two Birds with One Stone?" by Cornelia Caseau and Gilles Grolleau discusses some of the behavioral arguments for why clients may anticipate that impact investing is necessarily at the cost of other investment objectives.

Four research articles follow. In the first, Dion Bongaerts, Xiaowei Kang,CFA, Mathijs van Dijk help us rethink volatility targeting with their article on “Conditional Volatility Targeting.” In the next, David Blitz, Guido Baltussen, and Pim Van Vliet ask what happens “When Equity Factors Drop Their Shorts”! Our third research article, by Manuel Ammann, Sebastian Fischer, and Florian Weigert, focuses on "Factor Exposure Variation and Mutual Fund Performance." Our final research article is "Provision of Longevity Insurance Annuities," by Dale Kintzel and John A. Turner.

The issue wraps up with a Viewpoint appropriate for our times: “Gold, the Golden Constant, and Déjà Vu,” by Claude Erb, CFA, Campbell R. Harvey, and Tadas Viskanta.