Browsing: Alpha Seekers

Presumably 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

Guest 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

The 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

In 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

Guest columnist Charles Skorina with a cautionary tale of greed and deceit and less-than-best practices at a large public pension plan.Read More

Obamacare'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

Meredith Jones' book on investing in women takes it to the Street and comes back with some solid conclusions.Read More

Low 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

Larry 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 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

Charles Skorina looks at the new crew at NYU.Read More

Andrew Beer continues his discussion on slashing hedge fund fees without burning yourself or your clients.Read More

Faille 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

For 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

SPM "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

Look 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

The 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

Funds of funds are quite different entities from single-manager funds from the point of view of the number of women in senior C-suite roles. Different in what direction? That depends upon the country under consideration. Read More

A new report from Eurekahedge tries to go beyond some obvious observations about the performance of hedge funds there in 2014, or about the performance of that country's broad economy last year. Eurekahedge talked to seven experts in the field. They took quite different views on the most basic of questions. So different that a contrarian would have a tough time finding the consensus to counter. Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison looks at both sides of the quantitative investment debate.Read More

Guest columnist Peter Urbani looks at emerging managers and why they may be re-emerging and bringing alpha with them.Read More

The significance of the size of bank reserves and deposits as channels for the influence of QE upon macro-economic factors varies bank by bank. Monetary levers don't work on the really big rocks. A word on implications for the equity positions in those banks. Read More

Pershing Square owns 9.7% of Allergan's equity. Further, Valeant's proposal is structured so that Pershing Square is more of a co-bidder than a seller. Read More

Guest columnist Andrew Cohan explores the challenges in today's alpha hunt.Read More

Asset managers within the Asian boutique universe keep telling GFIA that "asset raising is hard" in the present climate. It isn't going to become easy any time soon, but there is a new level of stability.Read More

Guest columnist Paul Thomas looks at the energy markets.Read More

Eighty-nine percent of the respondents in a newly released Natixis survey of institutions said they expect they will be able to meet their future obligations. But they aren't as optimistic about the fate of individuals in their own countries who are now trying to save for retirement. Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison takes a hard look at asset raising and the people who do it.Read More

You can't expect to harvest much alpha if you simply buy on good sentiment as measured through news or on the web, and sell on negative sentiment. As the authors of this white paper put it in quant-speak, such predictive value as these measures have 'does not translate ... cleanly into return space.'" Read More

Guest columnist John Bhakdi looks at the future of venture capital in this final segment of a three-part series.Read More

Asness, Frazzini and Pedersen produce data indicating that over a long period in the U.S., a regular bet-against-beta strategy, one not designed either to accentuate or to eliminate differences among the different industries represented in the portfolio, earned CAPM alpha of 0.73. Read More

Noah Smith, an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook and a very sharp blogger (Noahpinion), expressed recently an insight on his blog worth whatever additional exposure I can give it here. This is especially so because the title Smith gives his blog entry, “KrugTron the Invincible” may be oneRead More