Although John Wenker manages a portfolio that invests only in real estate, his goal is to build a balanced portfolio diversified across property types and driven mainly by stock selection. He believes that the long-term success in the REIT space is driven by industry expertise, a bottom-up approach that requires hard work on each name, and a focus on quality.

A major challenge for financial professionals is satisfying the expectations of a more educated and demanding client base. Advisors want to employ more sophisticated strategies but need to execute them in a simple way. That’s the big picture behind the success of ProShares ETFs. They enable investors to easily hedge or magnify their exposure to broad indexes, sectors, asset classes, or styles.

Over time active managers have a very difficult time beating the benchmark as they do poor cash timing, they have poor sector bets and they overweight the stocks too much. What the PathMaster Domestic Equity Fund manager Rich O’Hara is trying to do is capture the size and the style shifts of the market and not individual stocks. The Fund maintains a well-diversified portfolio primarily of ETFs which helps reduce the risk of picking the wrong stocks.

Through its 5,000-year history of being money gold hasn’t lost its purchasing power. That is why the OCM Gold Fund is predominately looking for un-hedged gold producers in order to give its investors exposure to rising gold prices in a rising gold price environment. Using an active tiered approach, the fund manager Gregory M. Orrell is looking for companies that are growing production and making discoveries in order to be able to replace reserves.

Providing income is no longer enough if you want to address the long-term retirement needs, according to Mark Simenstad, manager of the Thrivent Diversified Income Plus Fund. The fund invests in a mix of asset classes to provide income, downside protection, and capital appreciation. Employing a multi-manager strategy, the fund relies mainly on quantitative methods to assess the relative value between the various asset classes and to make allocations.

Midas Fund benefits through investment in companies with attractive fundamentals. Thomas B. Winmill, fund manager, looks at three pieces of data about any company — People, Projects and Pricing — to find quality companies with unique combinations of strength in operations, products, and finances. He believes that People — quality in management — is the most important, with the strongest indicator of quality found in their track record.

Growth portfolios are associated with more risk but Joseph Axtell, the manager of the DWS Global Opportunities Fund, believes that if you have the flexibility to look for growth anywhere, you can control your risks better. He manages the fund with maximum choices not only in terms of locations, but also in terms of market cap and growth type. A crucial aspect for finding opportunities is the input from Deutsche Bank’s local analysts all over the world.