Flexible Plan Investments' Dr. Z. George Yang, CFA, takes third in 2013 NAAIM Wagner Award competition

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., April 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Flexible Plan Investments' Dr. Z. George Yang, CFA, is the 2013 third-place winner of the NAAIM Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management for his paper, "Filtered Market Statistics and Technical Trading Rules," as announced by the National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) last week. He competed with entries from around the world, including the US, Great Britain, Italy, Sweden, and New Zealand. This is Yang's third time winning one of the top three awards in the competition, which has been run since 2009.

In his paper, Yang, Director of Research at Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd., argues that by filtering out the "noise" around daily price changes, we can better explore market inefficiencies to improve rules-based market timing results. He describes how the daily price fluctuations of some of the most widely followed stock indexes contribute little to many tools of technical analysis. He proposes creating a filtering threshold for daily returns to determine trading rules.

Yang concludes that "by dynamically calibrating market trend or mean reversion by volatility-based filtering 'day-in and day-out,' a rules-based technical trader or an active investor can win at long-run investing."

"The paper was excellent – well written and practical on a novel topic with superior analysis. I'm hoping a new FPI strategy will result from it," comments Jerry Wagner, President and Founder of Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd.

Yang echoes Wagner's thoughts, "With the team effort of our much enhanced research group, I am confident that my proposals can be implemented in the near future."

Dr. Yang has extensive knowledge in the financial and technology fields with a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University and an MBA degree from the University of Michigan. Dr. Yang joined Flexible Plan Investments as Director of Research in July 2008, following a 10-year engineering career developing quantitative and analytical methods in the automotive industry. He was a winner of the Henry Ford Technology Award from Ford Motor Company in 1999.

About Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd.:
Established in 1981, Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd. is a leading provider of investment risk management services. As a founding member of the National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM), Flexible Plan Investments is one of the trade association's largest and oldest active money managers. The company's mission is to provide investors with competitive returns, while reducing risk through the use of diversified investment products, cutting-edge technology and support services. For more information, visit www.flexibleplan.com.

About the Wagner Award
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. A jury of investment professionals selected by the Wagner Award committee reviewed entries judging papers on the: practical significance to practitioners of active investing; quality of exposition; analytical rigor; and novelty of results. Top winning papers and entries can be found at: http://naaim.org/wagneraward.aspx.

The 2013 top prize went to David Klein, of Capital Context of Oakland, California, for an innovative white paper entitled, "Abstract of: Equity Sector Rotation via Credit Relative Value."

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 Flexible Plan Investments