The research aims to clarify portfolio manager (PfM) job functions and design essential and marginal job functions a PfM should perform. Often understood as a tool for embodying the company strategy and creating its value, portfolio management is viewed chiefly from the project management and investment perspectives. Despite the differences in understanding portfolio management from different perspectives, on the fundamental level, outcomes have similarities shown in the literature review. Different PfM studies display primarily descriptive characteristics of the role, which are blurry and do not add a solid basis in understanding the job functions. This study is qualitative, with content analysis as its main method. We chose literature and electronic sources that meet the following conditions: published during the past ten years; focused on a PfM or portfolio management process-related topics; containing a description of PfM tasks, activities, functions and/or responsibilities. We single out 19 PfM job functions, including seven essential and twelve marginal ones. These findings are significant, serving as a basis for building PfM job descriptions and competency models along with assisting both novice and experience PfMs in enhancing their performance.

The outbreak of infectious diseases inevitably causes a significant decline in the performance of the tourism, hospitality, and leisure industries. However, the impact of active epidemic-prevention measures on their performance, due to restrictions on daily activities, and that of proper epidemic control on the expectations of improved future performance, remain unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the effect of the announcement of Taiwan’s first confirmed COVID-19 case on shareholders’ wealth, stock trading frequency, and investment risk. Taiwan’s excellent epidemic-prevention performance makes its stock markets an appropriate empirical target to investigate the effects on stock price, trading volume, and return volatility, to obtain a comprehensive picture of investors’ behavior and reactions. Our results show that although active epidemic prevention did not prevent severe accounting performance decline, it only had a mild, short-term effect on investment performance. Thus, it protected shareholders’ wealth and strengthened their ability and willingness to continue business operations.

Piotroski (2000) selects samples that with lower book-to-market ratio and higher F-score to form value investing portfolio. This study modifies his procedure by two ways and use Taiwan data from 2001 to 2020 to test the performance. First, we select samples with high and increasing F-score. The annualized return is found to be 26.78% that is about 4.6% higher than the performance of Piotroski (2000). Second, we add addition indicators (P/E, momentum, and firm size) as third indicator, we show an annualized return of 29.16%. Such modification improves the efficiency of value investing. In addition, we suggest one-year evaluation period for samples and one-year holding for value investing. Our selection procedure generates limited candidates based on one-year cycle, benefiting retail investors who have no sufficient capital and suffer from frequent trading.