Alpha is often found in the company of those investors who are earliest in seeing the first hints of future events unfolding. Topsy is a new source of that capability.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Even against the backdrop of a global recession, the top 50 fastest growing companies in the USA averaged growth rates between 3,893% and 40,882% in the three years to the start of 2011.  These are rates of return which more than compensate the investor for the risk of making high-growth-young-company-investments.  For some investors, alternative markets [...]

Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001 on the subject of cognitive models of human hypertext navigation.

Jeremy King of Knight Pacific discusses his contrarian views on investing in Asia.

Alpha Hunters Andrew Timpson and Joseph Schlater of Busara Advisors talk about what it takes to get an emerging manager allocation.

Chris Brodie has been trading commodities for over 20 years, and set up Krom River in 2006. Scotsman Brodie relocated to Zug in Switzerland several years ago and has no regrets about the move. The fund’s best year so far was 2008 when it rose by 37% while the GSCI fell by two thirds, and it was also up in August of this year. Krom River are running both discretionary and systematic funds, and also have a dedicated agricultural vehicle. We touched on a range of topics that CAIA candidates and charterholders will be familiar with. Krom River is a signatory of the Hedge Fund Standards Board that has been discussed on AAA.

The concept underpinning financial exchanges can be traced back through much of human history. In Aristotle's Politics, "...there is the anecdote of Thales and his financial device.... he knew by his skill in the stars while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having little capital, he gave earnest-money for the use of all the olive-press in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no one bid against him. When the harvest-time came, and many wanted them all at once and of a sudden, he let them out at any rate which he pleased, and made a quantity of money..." While technology has moved on, the basic principle of futures and options exchanges remains the same. Participants in the market can take the role of Thales (using their insight to bet on price increases), the olive-press-owners (who hedged that Thales' price for the future was higher than they would otherwise get) or even investors who provide 'earnest money' to Thales (assuming markets will rise) or fund the olive-presses (assuming prices will fall).

In Part II of this Alpha Hunter series, we examine the role intellectual property plays in the U.S. economy.

Dennis Lohfert, founder of Ion Asset Architecture, discusses quantitative trading strategies and how they are affected by current market conditions.

Building with BRICs, an interview with Jim O'Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management

A new academic paper suggests oil and other resources are spiking and retreating thanks to speculative activity, including trading by hedge funds. From our viewpoint: duh...

Patent trolls aren't the only ones hiding under the bridge and collecting tolls on intellectual property. Alpha Hunter Michael Friedman discusses the hidden alpha potential in IP.

AllAboutAlpha.com spoke to John Zito, portfolio manager for credit opportunities at Brencourt, about some of the strategies Brencourt has employed and continues to employ in its search for alpha. He observed that one of the main investment strategies pursued by the Credit Opportunities Fund in particular is capital structure arbitrage.

The adage that everything in moderation is a good thing doesn't necessarily apply to funds of hedge funds, according to a recent academic report.

In any economic system, the fixed-income market plays an essential role as one of the principal ways of financing enterprise (be it corporate or sovereign).  Research shows that at the end of 2010, the global bond market had amounts outstanding of over US$95 trillion (to put that in context, the World Bank reported the total [...]

Professor Neil Johnson talks about the DNA of financial markets with AllAboutAlpha's Vikas Shah

Dr. Bob Swarup, of CAIA, and a Partner of Pension Corporation LLP, in London, was the keynote speaker at the Emerging Managers Forum on July 7. He presented “The Outlook for Alternatives in Today’s Economic Environment.”

This is the first of a new series called "Alpha Hunters." The nimble qualities of alternative investments is part of what makes them essential to every investor's portfolio. They can move quickly to take advantage of market inefficiencies and go where other more traditional investment vehicles cannot. It is in the spirit of seeking the ever-moving alpha that we introduce this series, reaching out to experts in different strategies to see where they are finding alpha. We hope you find this series illuminating and please feel free to send suggestions for Alpha Hunters you'd like to read about. Kristin Fox Managing Editor