2012 Wagner Award Second-Place Winner is Michael Hartmann for "Short Term Alpha as a Predictor of Future Mutual Fund Performance" paper

LITTLETON, Colo., May 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) has announced that Michael Hartmann is the 2012 second-place winner of the NAAIM Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management for his paper "Short Term Alpha as a Predictor of Future Mutual Fund Performance."

In his paper, Hartmann examines a relatively simple quantitative approach on how to select mutual funds expected to provide above average returns. The approach is deliberately constrained to only select funds belonging to a specific Morningstar assigned asset class style box. This is done to remain within the constraints of a traditional strategic asset allocation framework, while allowing an active investment management overlay on the strategic asset allocation model. Through his research, he was able to determine that short-term mutual fund alpha is a predictor of above average returns for relatively short-term holding periods.

As Hartman confidently concluded, "I believe that this study makes a compelling argument to implement a technical fund selection strategy as an overlay to any strategic asset allocation model, to benefit the client and allow the financial professional to point to tangible superior investment results."

Hartmann, Chief Investment Officer, Plan To Invest Capital Management, Inc., has extensive financial background and holds a MBA degree from the University of Denver. As an actively licensed CPA in Colorado, his experience ranges from international tax planning to financial software development to money management. Hartmann was among some of the first financial planners to review and introduce innovative new strategies to clients, including principal protected investments and market inverse products. He also worked with several financial services organizations to design and program state-of-the-art stock selection and trading systems.

A jury of investment professionals selected by the Wagner Award committee reviewed entries and awarded prizes. The criteria used in judging the papers are: practical significance to practitioners of active investing; quality of exposition; analytical rigor; and novelty of results. In addition to Greg Morris, Chairman of the Investment Committee and Chief Technical Analyst at Stadion Money Management, the jury included Dr. Bill Barack of Lindisfarne Investments, LLC.; John Ehlers, author and President of Mesa Software; John McClure, President of ProfitScore Capital Management; and Jerry Wagner, President of Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd.

In its fourth year, the NAAIM Wagner Award is designed to expand awareness of active investment management techniques and the results of active strategies. With nearly twice as many entries as last year, the 2012 Wagner Awards attracted an international response with authors from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, and India and from ten states across the United States. Receiving the $10,000 first place prize in the competition was Gary Antonacci, Principal, Portfolio Management Associates of Sarasota, Florida for his paper "Momentum Success Factors."

About the Wagner Awards

In honor of the vision and work of NAAIM founding member and president and CEO of Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd., Jerry Wagner, the Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management annually awards $10,000 to a first-placed paper providing evidence of the validity of an active investing approach using a trading system that outperforms the market by some well accepted metric such as risk-adjusted return, annual return or drawdowns. Second-place and third-place winners are awarded $3,000 and $1,000, respectively. Top winning papers and entries can be found at: http://naaim.org/wagneraward.aspx.

The top prize in 2011 went to Thomas Krawinkel, German Quantitative Trader and Software Programmer, for an innovative white paper entitled, "Buying Power - The Overlooked Success Factor."

About NAAIM

The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) is a non-profit trade group of nearly 200 registered investment advisor firms that collectively manage over $31 billion in assets. NAAIM member firms provide active money management services to their clients to produce favorable risk-adjusted returns as an alternative to more passive, buy-and-hold investment strategies. NAAIM publishes the weekly Survey of Manager Sentiment, the NAAIM Active Mutual Fund (AMF) Index, and sponsors the annual Uncommon Knowledge conference along with smaller conferences on managing portfolios, trading techniques for various instruments and markets, regulation and compliance, and other topics of interest to its membership. For more information, visit www.NAAIM.org.

SOURCE National Association of Active Investment Managers