Infrastructure is a perpetual investment, whether it's rebuilding old, existing underpinnings in developed markets or building the foundations that turn an emerging nation into a developing one. Preqin looks at this lesser known investment that underpins many alternative portfolios.

2011 was the year private equity managers learned to accept that what they got even if it wasn't always quite what they wanted. Investors talk about what they want and need in 2012.

The right question is not what were they thinking, but what were they feeling? Get organized about detailing what feelings are being acted out and you’ve landed on the missing link in risk prediction.

Emerging OTC derivatives in the emerging markets of Latin America and Asia are just one more sign that these countries are growing up.

"Farhaz Miah, of Preqin, sets out the numbers for private real estate fundraising in 2011, showing that the market continues to suffer from the impact of the 2008 crisis. He notes, also, that debt strategies have become increasingly popular, both in specifically debt-strategy funds and in opportunistic funds that employ debt strategies as part of a broader structure."

AAA sat down with Alex Gurvich and Jim Mitchell, both of The Rockledge Group, an investment advisory firm headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. We began by discussing the mid-January launch of a new product that gives the long-short equity strategy an ETF format, and ended up talking about a good deal else, such as the inherent superiority of ETFs over mutual funds, and Pimco's recent recognition of that fact.

Since transaction costs and the illiquidity of certain portions of an index make ideal tracking impossible, there will be a difference between the return of a tracking ETF, such as those tracking ETFs that are structured as UCITS in Europe, and the return of the underlying index or benchmark. The European Securities and Markets Authority maintains that investors should be informed of the factors that are likely to affect the size and the volatility of this difference.

Alpha Hunter Khiem Do talks about Asia and where the alpha is from his perspective.

The Hartford (CT) CFA Society recently hosted a workshop on “Pension Risk Management and Governance.” The discussion proved to be mostly, though not exclusively, about ERISA and about how plan sponsors may arm themselves against the sorts of litigation it may inspire. Moderator Martin Rosenburgh, who is both an attorney and a financial analyst, and currently [...]

Peter Urbani looks at Cornish Fisher and modified VaR as a function of skewness.

"...If all the money that's ever been invested in hedge funds had been put in treasury bills instead, the results would have been twice as good..." This is the astonishing finding of Simon Lack in his book "The Hedge Fund Mirage".

Two scholars affiliated with the Center for European Economic Research, drawing upon European data between 2000 and 2008, maintain that PE backed companies do not suffer from higher bankruptcy rates than their control group of comparable companies. Their paper also addresses the relationship between bankruptcy risk on the one hand and the syndicated (or, conversely, the stand-alone) nature of a PE deal. It finds no significant relationship.

The SEI asked institutional investors in hedge funds what was the number one reason for their inclusion of such funds in their portfolio. The most popular single choice was "absolute return." On the other hand, if you combine the numbers of the distinct answers that involve limiting the downside, then the percentage of respondents who gave some risk-management focused answer is 56 percent. As SEI says, this is "a marked cultural shift from the early days of hedge funds, when many investors focused on their potential to produce outsided returns."

Infrastructure is a basic need for any country, no matter what size. However, investing in infrastructure funds has been scant since its peak in 2007. That may be about to change.

In Singapore, some of the synthetic ETFs involve considerably more exposure to uncollateralized counterparty risk than the 10 percent or less that UCITS would allow. Singapore has, for example, the iShares MSCI India tracker, which has a 20 to 25 percent exposure. But Celent sees a possibiliuty that laxity will prove a winning move vis-a-vis Hong Kong.

In spite of what the media might have us believe, it isn't quite the end of the world as we know it, particularly as it applies to European private equity.

AIMA, in a report sharply critical of the proposed European Union financial transaction tax, sets out the way in which the tax could burden businesses, and their consumers, to a degree far greater than the proponents contend. After all, any single product may pass through several stages between raw materials and final consumer, as there are several steps between farmer harvesting wheat and retail outlet, such as Tesco, selling pasta. Businesses at every stop along the way (farmers, wheat processers, pasta extruders) will naturally want to hedge their own operational risks in the financial markets, so the price of the finished product will reflect the repeated imposition of the FTT.

First, an investor (according to a new white paper on due diligence from Merlin Securities) must decide what kind of strategy it is to which he wants exposure, and generate a list of managers who practice that strategy. Thereafter he can focus on each firm on that list looking at each of the three (qualitative) components of management, and subjecting his impressions to a variety of (quantitative) tests. Tripartite divisions seem to come into play a lot.

It seems that Patrick Byrne is interested in using a lawsuit filed in Canada in October 2011 as an opportunity for contesting the substantive merits, that is, providing evidence that the conspiracy exists as described and that Nazerali’s part in it was accurately portrayed in the various webpages of Deep Capture (called “chapters” for some reason). That may well prove healthy.

The fortunes of the world’s ultra high net worth (UHNW) individuals have surpassed $25 trillion. This is an astonishing figure, made even more so when contextualized against the value of the entire world's economic output (GDP) which, in 2010, was 'just' $63 trillion.

Godfrey Cadogan's formula, linking high-frequency trading, bubbles and crashes all into one formula of extreme simplicity (or "parsimony" as Cadogan puts it) leaves our reporter wondering: does the rendering of facts as a formula make them clearer, or does it just create a misleading patina of precision? Emanuel Derman recently warned of the overly simple models of finance economists, and perhaps this is a new token of that type.

A recent study, in which Steve Kaplan of the University of Chicago collaborated with Bob Harris of the University of Virginia and Tim Jenkinson of Oxford, addressed fund-level performance using data from Burgiss Group. Kaplan said this study indicates that “private equity has performed remarkably well.” In the period 1990 to 2008, a dollar in PE returned to investors 300 to 400 basis points a year more than a dollar in the equities of the S&P 500, net of all fees. This, if accepted, still leaves the question of the relationship of PE funds/firms to one another. Are they all the same?

If every fund is number one, then no one is number one. Irina Zeltser examines performance rankings in private equity.

IMF economist Manmohan Singh, in a recent working paper for the IMF, makes a case that pledged collateral is a critical financial lubricant, and that since the collapse of Lehman in September 2008 there has been a significant and troubling decline in its supply. Certain measures intended by regulators to enhance financial stability may in fact undermine it, by worsening the supply/demand mismatch, in effect creating a grey market for this pledged collateral.

Google, Apple, eBay and Amazon have a combined market capitalization of almost double the top five world retailers combined. We investigate the alpha opportunities with these dot-com giants.

This is a column of non-sequential thoughts including but not limited to topics appearing on AllAboutAlpha emphasizing the heartbeat behind the statistics which add up to alpha (definition expanded by the author to suit their purpose). When the relevance isn't apparent at first, lubricate with a bit of your favorite drink, herb or pharmaceutical, and things will make a lot more sense. It's all good. Doug Friedenberg ran a convertible arbitrage hedge fund in a previous century and learned first hand most of the mistakes asset managers can make. In the current century, he works to finance small to mid-sized businesses with a particular specialty in cross-border trade and letters of credit, which sometimes involves emerging/frontier markets. No word yet on plans for next century; maybe a posthumous autobiography.

Celent says that both the IT world and the financial markets long assumed that the latter had to employ the former in a “batch mode.” A firm would process trades through the day, recording these in a data base. Then at the end of the day, programs that could manipulate this data in search of exploitable patterns would operate on the day’s results as a batch. That is the mode of operation that “has become increasingly obsolete.”

The Mathema report is full of cautions, and indeed adopts a quite generally gloomy tone. The markets, it tells us, don’t lend any credence to the political fixes that have been offered for the eurozone and especially for its peripheral players. If the fixes did have credibility, then the PIIGS’ 10-year government benchmark yields would have been falling significantly of late vis-à-vis the 10 year German Bund yield. But there has been no such fall.

Guest columnist Charles Hage looks at hedge fund risk and discusses the long and the short of it.

If the actual results of the Korea Composite Stock Price Institute fitted a normal distribution (a "Bell curve,") then the index would record a daily loss larger than 3 percent only once every 1,219 years. In fact, it records such a loss once every 2.3 years. To fit the extraordinary real-world volatility of KOSPI and many other Asian markets, institutional investors especially should consider structured equity products that explicitly target a level of volatility.

At present, 21 percent of the world’s wealth belongs in the developed economies, but by 2020 that figure will have risen to 30 percent, according to a new report.

Distressed debt strategies have long been bedeviled by the shifting and thus unpredictable nature of the law of avoidance, or fraudulent conveyance, in the U.S. Perhaps it is, as some have said, because the law was written for a simpler time, and an industrial rather than a post-industrial country.

Our holiday bug in your ear is an encouragement to practice the Golden Rule in the year to come.

On Oct. 30, a Sunday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission received a draft report from MF Global that for the first time showed a shortfall in the segregated funds, a deficit of $900 million. At this time, both MF Global and the CFTC were referring to this in anodyne terms as an “accounting error.”

Bandon Capital's managing directors believe it is possible to generate alpha from unique non-market sources, and that they do so through their forecasts of domestic and overseas sovereign interest rates.

A recent meeting of an advisory group of the CFTC discussed the proper definition for high frequency trading, on the premise that only once a definition is in place can there be focused monitoring of the consequences of HFT.

Root Capital since inception have provided $330 million in credit to 349 small and growing businesses in 30 countries, maintaining a 99% repayment rate from our borrowers and a 100% repayment rate to our investors. This year alone, they have supplied $120 million in credit to 250 businesses which represent (or aggregate) 220,000 small-scale producers. That investment will (at a conservative estimate) benefit the lives of over 1.1 million people.

Fear has gripped investors since the crises of 2008 and 2009 and the pain keeps coming back with a resounding smack every time a news story breaks. However, investors are starting to move back into the markets and if emerging managers aren't in the game now, they aren't going to get to play.

We report on a talk given by Dr. Keith Crane of the Rand Organization about renewable energy and climate change at a meeting of the FInancial Policy Council. Dr. Crane showed that the cost differences between renewables and coal shrink when the costs of carbon emission controls are also counted. Subsequent research revealed possible reasons why the average person in the United States has a unique inability to accept climate science, in opposition to the conclusions of the U. S. Defense Department.

Financial crises always turn up new risks – and new opportunities. Famously, George Soros bet against the Bank of England during a fiscally challenged time in the early 1990s and pocketed a billion and change for his troubles. Was that a spectacular guess in a geopolitical game of chicken, or was it true alpha? We don't know, because we don't have the data. Currencies didn't much matter then; they do now.

The European Debt crisis has been the epicenter of the most recent market earthquakes. Now that a resolution is on the table, the "What now?" question remains.

The Commodity Customer Coalition has now issued a white paper presenting its own view of the “background, impacts, and solutions to MF Global’s Demise.”

We near the third anniversary of the day (December 10, 2008) when the two sons of Bernard Lawrence Madoff informed authorities that their father had just admitted to them that his asset management operation was “one big lie.” One of those sons, Mark Madoff, killed himself one year and one day later. The dimensions of [...]

EisnerAmper LLP's latest edition of “Pulse of Private Equity” finds that PE firms in the second half of 2011 are becoming “more sober about the potential for transactions,” compared to last year or earlier this year.

Pragma studied the empirical relationship between the routing behavior of market participants and the fee structures of the venues through using publicly available trade and quantity (TAQ) data from June 2011....The hypothesis left standing is that the inverted fee structure acts as intended. "[W]hen there is a choice of where to take liquidity, the pecking order is clear and coincides with cost."

A new study from SEI shows If an alternative strategy can be offered in a mutual fund structure it has a much broader market opportunity than if not. Hedge fund managers want the mutual fund market just as mutual fund managers want to use the broader hedge fund range of strategies.

"...by following and understanding the latest thinking in managing sovereign credit risk- portfolio and risk managers will not only be able to extract greater returns from their existing investments, but deliver greater protection for clients......"

Could it be that truth is finally stranger than science fiction? The next battle of the quantitative trading strategies may offer some algorithmic features that look downright qualitative.

Amongst equity long-short funds, which constitute about half of the Asian hedge fund universe, the returns of hedge funds “were sometimes mean reverting but at other times displayed persistence in positive/negative momentum.” That is to say that sometimes a coin that has come up heads three times will come up tails the fourth time, but at other times it will persist in coming up heads the fourth time.

The true opportunities now lie in taking illiquidity. The panic – for there is no other word to describe this behaviour – today presents those who can afford to have a longer-term investment horizon with a unique time arbitrage.