James Rickards is a global expert on financial markets and global security. In this exclusive interview, he discusses some of the massive threats our financial markets face (internally and externally) and explains why he thinks "….all the tools in modern finance are basically false science. "

Data on the endowments of institutions of higher learning shows a significant spread between the performance of the largest endowments and the lagging performance of the smaller. The return that endowments received on their use of alternative strategies, too, depends in part upon the size of the endowment doing the investing. Endowments under $25 million in assets under management made only 9.5 percent on this asset class in FY 2011, while those with more than $1 billion in AUM made a 16.9 percent return hunting in the same jungles.

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.

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

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.

"...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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......"

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.

Equity hedge fund performance has resembled the results of the S&P Index lately. We speculate that regression to the mean is because humans are involved, and find reasons to be cheerful for the group's future.

The hedge fund industry that invests in Asia is increasingly run from within the region, especially from the two hub cities of Hong Kong and Singapore, according to an August 2011 report by Singapore based consult In the early days of the Asian hedge fund industry, Asian strategies were quite generally run from outside of Asia [...]

The world is a fairly small pond in which ripples anywhere soon shake the surface everywhere. Such an observation, like the word “globalization,” has become a cliché, but the truth behind them both becomes quite obvious in the course of a new “Viewpoint” paper by Ernst & Young that examines fund distribution strategies in the [...]

Intuition (codified by many models) suggests that investors have to be bribed to accept risk, so that there ought to be a positive link for any given class of security between the amount of risk, and thus the measurement of volatility, on the one hand, and expected return on the other. A puzzle arises, then, from empirical research indicating that “idiosyncratic” volatility, that is, the volatility due to the characteristics of a specific security, is negatively correlated with return once one passes the mid-point of the range of volatility.

We visit a Town Hall meeting to discuss the Occupy Wall Street group's use of social media. While there, we are reminded of the potential power of social media and its use to affect public opinion without spending gobs of money. We also learn reasons why the investment community should, at minimum, pay some attention.

Spread capture is a percentage of the bid-ask spread, so that if an algorithm always accepts the outstanding offer when buying – if it is always the one to cross -- it will capture 0 percent of the spread. If a deal is concluded on its own bid determined through limit orders, on the other hand, it captures 100 percent of the spread. The spread capture metric is popular, the Pragma paper says, because it “reflects a widespread assumption that the higher the number the better the performance of the algorithm.”

In spite of a difficult fundraising climate, there are some positive things about the current real estate investing environment. Like Scarlett O'Hara, institutional investors seem to think that "land is the only thing that matters."

Managers were asked: “other than delivering expected performance, what is the greatest challenge in satisfying investors?” The results were: getting investors comfortable with infrastructure, 22 percent; providing satisfactory performance attribution data, 19 percent; providing broader education/consulting, 18 percent; providing satisfactory risk analytics, 11 percent; other, 28 percent. The residual answer produced more favorable replies, then, than did any of the pre-scripted answers.

In spite of sketchy performance from some top managers, institutional investors remain committed to hedge funds and a large number are shopping for new relationships in 2012.

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 [...]

The classical philosopher Aristotle is often associated with the logical principle that every well-formed proposition is either true or false, either A or not-A.  Actually, Aristotle’s views were a bit more complicated than that. He raised the possibility for example that the truth of the statement “there will be a sea battle tomorrow” might be [...]

It is by now common knowledge that High Frequency Trading comprises 70 to 75% of market trading in North America and western Europe.  And it helps to remember that the primary usefulness of algorithmic trading is to provide liquidity to the investor class.  We presume that the distinction of said class is that its investment [...]

By John Brynjolfsson In October the markets voted: the EU finance ministers are ‘all in’ in their commitment to finding a solution to the Union’s troubles. Here, from a perch at Armored Wolf, however, we see a quagmire, and looking forward we will remain focused on the still inherent and deeply seated issues plaguing the [...]

By Christopher Faille The ideas of “cause and effect” seem simple enough when left unexamined. The cue stick hits the cue ball; the cue ball hits the eight ball; the eight ball rolls into the pocket. How can anyone fail to understand this?