Gary Antonacci awarded $10,000 NAAIM 2012 Wagner Award for "Momentum Success Factors" paper

LITTLETON, Colo., May 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM) announced today that Gary Antonacci is the 2012 first-place winner of the NAAIM Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management for his paper Momentum Success Factors. In its fourth year, the NAAIM Wagner Award is designed to expand awareness of active investment management techniques and the results of active strategies.

Of Antonacci's paper, the Chairman of the Award Committee, Greg Morris, wrote, "Mr. Antonacci demonstrates that investors utilizing momentum, what he calls 'the premier market anomaly,' must do so in both an absolute and relative sense. He then details a methodology for accomplishing this while constructing a diversified portfolio that outperforms on both a relative and absolute basis." Morris is Chairman of the Investment Committee and Chief Technical Analyst at Stadion Money Management.

Antonacci, Principal, Portfolio Management Associates of Sarasota, Florida, has over 30 years experience as an investment professional focusing on under exploited investment opportunities. He has an extensive financial background, with a MBA degree from the Harvard Business School. As an avid investor since the 1970's managing a stock options hedge fund, he pioneered the use of modern portfolio theory principles and optimization practices to allocate private and institutional investor funds for some of the world's best traders. Antonacci has concentrated on researching, developing, and applying asset allocation strategies that have their basis in academic research, authoring several investment articles and books on portfolio management.

A jury of investment professionals selected by the Wagner Award committee reviewed entries and award the 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 Morris, 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.

With nearly twice as many entries as last year, the 2012 Wagner Awards attracted an international response with authors from China, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, and India and from ten states across the United States. Receiving second place in the competition was Michael Hartmann from Plan to Invest Capital Management, of Greenwood Village, CO, for his paper "Short Term Alpha as a Predictor of Future Mutual Fund Performance." Z. George Yang (2011's second place winner) and Liang Zhong were awarded the third place prize for their paper "Optimal Portfolio Strategy to Control Maximum Drawdown (The Case of Risk-based Active Management with Dynamic Asset Allocation)." Second and third place winners will receive $3,000 and $1,000, respectively.

For the first time ever, an Honorary Mention designation was given to a submission. The distinction was made to Dave Klein, Partner, Capital Context, LLC. of Oakland, CA, for his paper "Credit-Informed Tactical Asset Allocation."

Top papers are published on the NAAIM website at www.NAAIM.org. Antonacci will be presenting his winning paper at the association's May 7-9, 2012 annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia at the Intercontinental Buckhead.

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. Previous 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 The National Association of Active Investment Managers