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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 [...]

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.

By Christopher Faille Charles Jones of Columbia Business School made a presentation at an SIFR event in Stockholm, titled “What do we know about algorithmic and high-frequency trading?” Although a distinguished professor like Jones would not put the matter this way, his thoughts do have me thinking of the old human-inhabited trading floors, and their cyberspace [...]

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.

By Christopher Faille One of the great clichés used by reporters, commenters, bloggers and twitterers in recent months has been that the central bankers of the developed world, and/or their Treasuries, have “run out of bullets.” They have “spent all their ammunition” seeking stimulus already and will have nothing in reserve should there be another serious [...]

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

By Christopher Faille A new report on hedge fund inflows indicates that the rate at which money is coming into the hedge fund industry reflects that industry’s improved performance, but that if these figures are segmented by strategy or geography, the different rates at which they are attracting money do not very accurately reflect their different [...]

By Christopher Faille Passive and active investments are often contrasted as if the distinction is self-evident. It isn’t. Even for an unambitious long-only equity indexed fund, trades have to be executed in order to maintain the desired balance, and these trades can be executed either well or poorly, in ways that help or hurt the investor. [...]

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

There will likely always be at least a simmering tension in the hedge fund industry between the managerial desire for discretion in the use of assets and every investor’s desire to have the option of withdrawing funds as needed. When a manager seeks to offer its investors more liquidity than its own portfolio can provide, [...]

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

The nature of funds of hedge funds, their scale and, more specifically, the added value they offer to their investors have all evolved over time, and will continue to evolve. In an interview, Brian W. Chung, senior vice president,senior portfolio manager for SSARIS Advisors, a Hedge Funds of Funds affiliate of State Street Global Advisors, spoke [...]

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 interviewed Arzhang Kamarei, a partner at Tradeworx, a quantitative investment management firm with expertise in high-frequency and medium-frequency equity market-neutral strategies.

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.