Personalities in AI
A Jack for Our Trade?
Jan 22nd, 2019 | Filed under: Newly Added, What about beta?, Who's Who, Personalities in AIBy Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association According to the Bible’s Book of Genesis 2:2, on the seventh day God rested after having created all the heavens and earth. Jack Bogle was on the eve of his tenth decade on this earth and he must have skipped both that chapter and verse. In fact, Jack was more of a Matthew 21:12 kind of guy. The one who comes into a templeRead More
Panayiotis Lambropoulos: The View from a Public Pension Manager’s Office
Nov 11th, 2018 | Filed under: Newly Added, Hedge Fund Operations and Risk Management, The A.I. Industry, Due Diligence Process, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Risk management, Asset allocation, Hedge Funds, Asset Allocation Models, Alternative Investments in Context, Institutional Asset Management, Risk Management Strategies & Processes, Risk Management & Operations, Allocating to A.I.On Nov. 13, the 24th Annual National Pension and Institutional Investment Summit convenes in Dallas Texas. CAIA is a sponsor of this event. Panayiotis Lambropoulos, portfolio manager of hedge funds at the Employees Retirement System of Texas, will offer his insights at a panel on emerging hedge fund managers. Lambropoulos’Read More
The View from Las Vegas: Quiet Buying? Aggressive Buying?
Sep 23rd, 2018 | Filed under: Newly Added, The A.I. Industry, Emerging Alternative Investments, Emerging markets, Digital currencies, Commodities, Personalities in AI, Alternative Investments in Context, Commodities: Examples, GoldOn Sept. 24, the 9th Annual Inside Alternatives and Asset Allocation event convenes at Wynn Las Vegas, with CAIA sponsorship. The purpose of the event: to look beyond traditional alternative investments and strategies, to take the measure of a new breed of alternatives, including impact/SRIs, cryptocurrencies, and the application ofRead More
Rukaiyah Adams, CIO Meyer Memorial Trust – doing good and investing well
Dec 26th, 2017 | Filed under: Newly Added, Who's Who, Institutional Investing, Personalities in AI, Endowments & Foundations, Institutional Asset Management, PractitionersBy Charles Skorina The $90 billion Oregon Pension ranks among the top 15 in the US, but how many in the industry know the current board chair, Ms. Rukaiyah Adams? Ms. Adams was born in Berkeley, CA, grew up in diverse, northeast Portland, and returned to her home city afterRead More
Amato on the Late-Cycle Dilemma
Nov 16th, 2017 | Filed under: Newly Added, Personalities in AI, Business News, Other Topics in A.I.Joseph V. Amato, president of Neuberger Berman Group LLC and Chief Investment Officer – Equities at Neuberger Berman, has written a thoughtful discussion of late about where the markets, and the business cycle, stands. This, the end of 2017, is a “late cycle” moment. Equities continue to rise, but theRead More
Paying the Top Guns of Institutional Investing
Sep 11th, 2017 | Filed under: Newly Added, Institutional Investing, Personalities in AI, Endowments & Foundations, Institutional Asset ManagementBy Charles Skorina Last month in Part One of this report we focused on relative performance. We ranked 107 CIOs by trailing 5-year returns. Now, we focus on how much institutions pay these excellent people. The bare comp numbers lead us to the tricky and perennial question of whether their payRead More
Til and Heckinger on Commodity Debacles, Part II
Aug 6th, 2017 | Filed under: Newly Added, Due Diligence Process, Personalities in AI, Risk Management & OperationsA new paper available at SSRN looks at two infamous commodity industry melt-downs: Amaranth and MF Global. It offers a diagnosis of each. The paper is co-authored by Hilary Till, of EDHEC – Risk, and Richard Heckinger, of the Working Group on Financial Markets, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. InRead More
The 100+ Top Guns of Institutional Investing
Jul 12th, 2017 | Filed under: Newly Added, Who's Who, Institutional Investing, Personalities in AI, Endowments & Foundations, Institutional Asset ManagementBy Charles Skorina This letter looks at the most recent five-year performance of over one hundred of the world’s best institutional investors. Endowment chief investment officers have an infinite investment horizon, a global playing field, and can invest in anything anywhere – within the broad policy limits set by theirRead More
Academics: No, Navinder Sarao Did Not Cause the Flash Crash
Oct 25th, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Hedge Fund Operations and Risk Management, Algorithmic and high-frequency trading, Risk management, Technology, Operations, Personalities in AI, Business News, Risk Management & Operations, Finance & EconomicsMid-October news reports tell us that Navinder Sarao has lost his effort to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States. So he will face charges in the U.S. in connection with the “flash crash” of May 2010, the incident in which the DJIA fell 998.5 points in less thanRead More
Harvard gives Narv the nod
Oct 17th, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Who's Who, Academic Foundations, Institutional Investing, Personalities in AI, Endowments & Foundations, Institutional Asset ManagementBy Charles Skorina As all the world now knows, Harvard has selected Columbia’s Nirmal P. “Narv” Narvekar as the new head of Harvard Management Company. His name had been bandied about as a prime candidate for weeks. We discussed it ourselves in our Aug. 29 newsletter. Reportedly, a few big-endowment CIOsRead More
Kyle Bass, IPR and Shorting Big Pharma
Sep 22nd, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Intellectual Property, Operationally Intensive Real Assets, Personalities in AI, Real Assets, Other Topics in A.I.Kyle Bass, the investor who shorted the market in residential mortgage-based securities a decade ago, with speculator success, is interested now in shorting the major pharmaceutical companies. He is certainly entitled to try that play. But what is especially provocative and controversial is that he also seems willing to giveRead More
Crunch Time for the Harvard Endowment
Aug 14th, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Institutional Investing, Personalities in AI, Endowments & Foundations, Institutional Asset ManagementBy Charles Skorina The hunt is underway for a new CEO at the Harvard Management Company. And chairman Paul Finnegan and his board intend to get it right this time. Counting interims, they’ve now had six CEOs at their shop since Jack Meyer departed in 2005, and mostly mediocre returns to show for it. AfterRead More
The Skorina Report: Russell Read and the Alaska Permanent Fund
Apr 27th, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Personalities in AIBy Charles Skorina Russell Read has just been appointed chief investment officer of the $52 billion Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC), and he’s headed for a state in crisis. The collapse of global oil prices has put a big squeeze on all of the world’s oil producers; and in Alaska, where oilRead More
Don’t Blame Bass for the Failure of Bear Stearns
Apr 3rd, 2016 | Filed under: Newly Added, Who's Who, The A.I. Industry, Hedge Funds, Personalities in AI, Other Topics in A.I.Prominent alpha seeker Kyle Bass is named in the March 29 Wall Street Journal with a headline and lead paragraph that suggest that he was the man who set in motion the avalanche that brought down Bear Stearns in the spring of 2008. The truth, as one discerns only fromRead More
Michigan State University Hires its First Chief Investment Officer
Jan 11th, 2016 | Filed under: Who's Who, Institutional Investing, Institutional Asset Management, PractitionersBy Charles Skorina Michigan State University announced the appointment of Philip Zecher as Chief Investment Officer on Friday, December 18th, 2015. Philip Zecher has just been appointed MSU’s first-ever chief investment officer, reporting directly to Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon, MSU’s president. The trustees announced the appointment on Friday and PhilRead More
After Seven Years: Philosophical Implications of the Madoff Fraud
Dec 30th, 2015 | Filed under: Newly Added, Derivatives, Due Diligence Process, Operations, Equity-linked Structured Products, Personalities in AI, Risk Management & OperationsIt has been seven years and a few days more now since Bernard Madoff acknowledged to authorities that “there is no innocent explanation” for the story they had just heard from his sons. It has been 15 and a half years since Harry Markopoulos ran the numbers regarding Madoff’s performanceRead More
Denial: The Role of Naked Shorting in the Fall of Martin Shkreli
Dec 27th, 2015 | Filed under: Newly Added, Equity Hedge Funds, Hedge Funds, Personalities in AI, Other Topics in A.I.The Shkreli case comes at a time when failures to deliver have begun to receive a new level of attention from regulators. Faille looks at the role of naked shorts in his troubles, including his recent indictment.Read More
Bitcoin’s Founder: Recent History and 2020 Vision
Dec 17th, 2015 | Filed under: Newly Added, Currencies, Emerging Alternative Investments, The Global Economy & Currencies, Entrepreneurs, Digital currencies, Personalities in AI, Finance & EconomicsTwo things happened almost at once recently: Wired told us who actually invented bitcoin, (well, it gave the world the latest hot theory), and officials in Australia raided that same fellow’s home in re a tax investigation. More specifically on the first of those points, Wired (and soon thereafter Gizmodo)Read More
Clash of the Hedge Funds: BioPharm Wars
Dec 1st, 2015 | Filed under: Newly Added, Equity Hedge Funds, Hedge Funds, Personalities in AI, PractitionersCLVS fell nearly 70% on adverse news from the FDA. The tricky call for investors is whether the drop was (a) just enough, (b) not yet enough, or (c) perhaps too much to discount this blow. Two savvy analysts have recently expressed sharply opposed views on this.Read More
Ben Carson Says Something Odd about Money
Oct 14th, 2015 | Filed under: Personalities in AIIt would be good to have presidential candidates who don't give every impression that they are uninformed and simply 'winging it,' when asked simple questions about monetary policy. It would be best to have candidates schooled in Austrian theory. Read More
Trumping the Competition: Lessons to Learn From ‘The Donald’
Sep 17th, 2015 | Filed under: Personalities in AILike, love or hate "The Donald," he knows how to elicit a reaction. Guest columnist Diane Harrison discusses "trumping" your competition.Read More
Supreme Court Decisions: Post-Announcement Hours & Days
Sep 10th, 2015 | Filed under: CAPM / Alpha Theory, Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Legislation/Court rulings, Alpha SeekersPresumably the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, in December 2008, that states can in fact make and enforce tougher labeling standards for cigarettes than does the federal government was a negative for tobacco stocks. But did that mean that stock prices had already anticipated the decision before it happened? or that they immediately adjusted downward on the morning the decision was announced? Or ... neither of those? Read More
The Skorina Report: Fearless Forecast Says That Endowment Returns Will Disappoint in FY2015
Sep 3rd, 2015 | Filed under: Performance, Analytics & Metrics, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha Seekers, Endowments & FoundationsGuest columnist Charles Skorina looks at the potential for 2016 endowment returns and finds them to be somewhat lacking... Could alternatives ride to the rescue?Read More
Administration, via Verrelli, Rolls the Dice on Insider Trading Issue
Aug 31st, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha Hunters, Legislation/Court rulingsNot all benefits are as tangible as a suitcase of cash, and the question of law for the Second Circuit, for the Ninth, and now perhaps for SCOTUS is: is friendship enough? how about regard for one's brother? Read More
CFTC Exempts ASX Clear from DCO Registration
Aug 25th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Commodities, Alpha Hunters, Alpha SeekersThe CFTC has issued its first exemption from the CDO registration mandate under 5b (h). The successful petition for that exemption, from ASX Clear, has the additional merit of having inspired an idiosyncratic seeming, but concise, comment letter, quoted in full here. Read More
Eurekahedge: The Markets are Reading the Headlines
Aug 18th, 2015 | Filed under: Commodities, Hedge Fund Strategies, Currencies, CTA, Alpha Strategies, Alpha SeekersIn the three month period that ends with July, Eurekahedge’s Greater China Index (which has 85 constituents) is down 9.39%. That has come about for precisely the reasons that a reader of the pertinent headlines would guess. Read More
The Skorina Report: Risky Business–Chief Investment Officers and Public Pension Plans
Aug 16th, 2015 | Filed under: Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Risk management, Alpha SeekersGuest columnist Charles Skorina with a cautionary tale of greed and deceit and less-than-best practices at a large public pension plan.Read More
Event-Driven Hedge Funds Rescued by Obamacare
Aug 11th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha SeekersObamacare's impact on the investment world may have been mitigated until very recently by the protracted and complicated litigation that the law immediately generated starting with its enactment in 2010. But now.... Read More
The Strength of Multi-Strat Is No Mystery
Aug 2nd, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, FeesCredit Suisse Capital Services says that appetite has increased of late, among institutional investors, for multistrategy funds. Faille offers some thoughts as to why. Read More
Crisis? Tempted to Flee to Shelter of Big Funds? Bad Idea
Jul 29th, 2015 | Filed under: CAPM / Alpha Theory, Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Behavioral financeThe authors of a new study of the relationship between fund size and performance employ a database consisting of 7,261 funds and their performance over a twenty year period (1994 to 2014). Spoiler alert: size is bad. Especially in a crisis.Read More
‘Women of the Street’—Not Just Another War Story
Jul 22nd, 2015 | Filed under: Retail Investing, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha SeekersMeredith Jones' book on investing in women takes it to the Street and comes back with some solid conclusions.Read More
Delivering Alpha Highlights: Part Two
Jul 20th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha SeekersLow interest rates and record equity valuations together mean that companies can use either stock swaps or borrowed cash or a combination of the two, to buy one another. Further, corporate executives infer that they have to keep buying in order not to become a target themselves. Read More
Delivering Alpha Highlights: Part One
Jul 19th, 2015 | Filed under: Media Coverage of Hedge Funds, Currencies, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha Seekers, ETFsLarry Fink is "deeply worried" that the combination of share repo with high-yield debt is "one of the reasons why we have a below trend-line economy. We're not investing in the future as much as we should." Carl Icahn, predictably, has a very different view of what ails us. Read More
The Old Puzzle of SRI: India and France
Jul 12th, 2015 | Filed under: Social investing, Alpha Strategies, Socially responsible investing, Alpha SeekersThe conclusion of two Indian scholars in a new study supports the view that socially responsible investing is good for investors in India. But Faille worries that the battle-of-the-studies has thus far been indecisive, and that aerodynamics suggests this insect shouldn't be able to fly. Read More
The Skorina Report: A Look at the New Investment Crew at NYU
Jul 9th, 2015 | Filed under: Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha SeekersCharles Skorina looks at the new crew at NYU.Read More
The Core Satellite Model: How to Cut Hedge Fund Fees in Half Part II
Jun 25th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Performance, Analytics & Metrics, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha Seekers, FeesAndrew Beer continues his discussion on slashing hedge fund fees without burning yourself or your clients.Read More
Hybrid Equity: Another Perspective on Private Equity
Jun 14th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Retail Investing, Private Equity, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Liquid AltsManagers who offer funds that provide shorter time frames to investment exits, greater liquidity through a hedge fund structure, and employ the event-driven skill set that identifies and manages an investment portfolio yielding private equity-like returns are finding increased interest from an investment community seeking returns married with reasonable liquidity. Read More
The Skorina Report: Wall Street Pay & CEO Performance: Who got their money’s worth?
Jun 4th, 2015 | Filed under: Alpha-centric Companies, Asset Managers, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, High-net-worth investorsCharles Skorina presents his annual CEO compensation report and a little bit more.Read More
One Decision, Two Courts, Three Nations, Four Angles
Jun 3rd, 2015 | Filed under: Media Coverage of Hedge Funds, Alpha Hunters, Insolvency, Alpha SeekersFaille is struck by a brief passage in the recent Nortel decision (the Delaware side of the Delaware/Ontario concord over allocation) that suggests the degree to which the United States dominates the patent-granting as well as the patent-litigating world. Like what the U.K. is for defamation.... Read More
Top Hedge Fund Managers: They Aren’t Wizards, but They Are Masters
May 28th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Real Estate, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alpha SeekersFor Faille, the stand-out essay in this collection of case studies, from CNBC's Maneet Ahuja, concerns Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner, of the Avenue Capital Group. As Myron Scholes says in his afterword to this volume, Lasry and Gardner take returns from those whose demand for liquidity makes them willing to give them up. Read More
Lies, Damned Lies and Alpha
May 21st, 2015 | Filed under: CAPM / Alpha Theory, Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesGuest columnist Andrew Beer looks at alpha.Read More
Northern Trust on Hedge Funds, Big Data and Transparency
May 20th, 2015 | Filed under: Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, TechnologyThe integration of data isn't fully on the hedge fund industry radar yet. Yet it may be critical to rebuilding manager-investor relations via whiz-bang 21st century technology. Read More
If I Can’t Call It a Hedge Fund, What AM I Going to Call It?
May 18th, 2015 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha HuntersIntrepid contributor Doug Friedenberg addresses a burning nomenclatural issue for the investment style formerly known as hedge funds and proposes a solution to save the financial system.Read More
A Caddie’s Observations on Money Management
May 14th, 2015 | Filed under: Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesGuest columnist Diane Harrison on investment lessons learned on the golf course.Read More
Comparing SPM to Elliott: And Other Thoughts on MBS Funds
May 6th, 2015 | Filed under: Derivatives, Alpha Hunters, Risk management, Alpha SeekersSPM "sticks out in [his] mind" as a successful manager with a "17 year track record" with returns in the mid 20s. "Where else are you going to get that?" Well, there is at least one other place that then comes to Brian Shapiro's thoughts: SPM's return compares to the return available from Elliott.Read More
The Skorina Report: The Best, The Rest & Our Pick for Public Endowment CIO of Decade
Apr 30th, 2015 | Filed under: Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesCharles Skorina looks at the top public endowments and discusses performance with Erik Lundberg.Read More
Griffin, Bernanke, and the Saud family
Apr 27th, 2015 | Filed under: Currencies, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Indexes, MacroeconomicsWhy has Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, hired former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke as a Senior Advisor? This decision represents a surprise given Griffin's views on "quantitative easing," views he forcefully expressed a couple of years ago. Read More
GOOG to Test Buy-on-Antitrust-Charge Theory
Apr 26th, 2015 | Filed under: Technology, Legislation/Court rulings, Alpha SeekersLook for the EC sometime in the near future to bring a complaint about the contracts into which Google has entered with manufacturers that require them to construct the handsets in a way that favors Google’s famous search engine [over, for example, Microsoft’s Bing.] But consider that even this preliminary skirmish over comparison shopping might be a bullish sign for GOOG.Read More
Some Assets are Hard to Ignore
Apr 23rd, 2015 | Filed under: Currencies, Infrastructure, Hard metals, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, GoldGuest columnist Diane Harrison looks at the world of alternatives to alternatives, including stamps, cars, farmland and more...Read More
They Do It Right Down Under: Australian Institutional Funds
Apr 14th, 2015 | Filed under: CAPM / Alpha Theory, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Indexes, Alpha Seekers, ETFsThe hapless U.S. mutual funds Chen and Gallagher sample have a nominally positive pre fee alpha only when measured against CAPM. That disappears into the negatives when the baseline used is the Fama-French model, and deeper into the negatives when the momentum factor is added. Read More