A 7-year $1.3 billion hedge fund manager Chelsea Brennan shares her investment advice.

A 7-year $1.3 billion hedge fund manager Chelsea Brennan shares her investment advice. Her advice encompasses several steps toward better financial literacy and freedom. From better retirement to superior socioeconomic status, each investor should understand his or her multi-year investment goals. For financially free and secure retirement, many investors focus on steady cash dividends, whereas, other investors seek healthy capital gains. It is important to keep a multi-year perspective to strike a better balance between these investment goals.

Also, it is easier to optimize average asset returns against multiple investment risks via multiple index funds. Each smart investor needs to diversify across U.S. and international index ETFs in stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, REITs, and mutual funds etc. In practice, diversification allows him or her to boost the Sharpe ratio from the U.S. stock market benchmark of 0.33-0.35 to 0.63-0.85. The Sharpe ratio often constitutes 10% average asset return as the numerator and 30% return volatility as the denominator for the U.S. stock market benchmark.

Multi-asset portfolio optimization boosts 10% average asset return to at least 15% and then reduces 30% return volatility to 20%. This dynamic asset allocation helps ensure a better reward-risk Sharpe ratio near 0.75 or the mid-point of the healthy target range.