Finance

Main article portfolio (finance)

In finance, a portfolio is a collection of investments held by an institution or a private individual. Holding a portfolio is part of an investment and risk-limiting strategy called diversification. By owning several assets, certain types of risk (in particular specific risk) can be reduced. The assets in the portfolio could include stocks, bonds, options, warants, gold certificates, real estate, futures contracts, production facilities, or any other item that is expected to retain its value.

Management, Marketing

In strategic management and marketing, a portfolio is a collection of products, services, or brands that are offered for sale by a company. In building up a product portfolio a company can use various analytical techniques including B.C.G. Analysis, contribution margin analysis, G.E. Multi Factoral analysis,and Quality Function Deployment. Typically a company tries to achieve both diversification and balance in their portfolio of product offerings.

see also: Product management, strategic management, marketing, problems with portfolio models

Education, learning

In education, portfolio refers to a personal collection of information describing and documenting a person’s achievements and learning. There is a variety of portfolios ranging from learning logs to extended collections of achievement evidence. Portfolios are used for many different purposes such as accreditation of prior experience, job search, continuing professional development, certification of competences.

Tens of millions of people across the world have already used some kind of portfolio. Alone in the UK, more than 4 million people have got a qualification (NVQ) through accreditation of prior learning or accreditation of work experience, and most of them have built a portfolio to collect the evidence required to get their certificate.

The recent explosion of knowledge, information and learning technologies has led to the development of digital portfolios or electronic portfolios, commonly referred as ePortfolios.

Politics

In politics, portfolio can refer to the office of the President in a country. Portfolio can also refer to the contents of the job a minister has. For example in the United Kingdom, Peter Mandelson's title was Minister Without Portfolio.