Browsing: Alpha Strategies

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 2 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA MembershipRead More

Should investors, especially institutional investors, push back (or push back harder than they have so far) against the fee structure preferred by those whom they pay to manage their money? And is the recent announcement from CalPERS such a push? Read More

Guest columnist Andy Tully looks at the future of renewable energy investment and finds a future so bright, you might need to wear shades.Read More

Guest columnist Don Steinbrugge looks at why the same hedge fund firms consistently bring in the assets.Read More

Intuitively, the problem with valuing the debt issued by an private SPE in an illiquid infrastructure project is this: the free cash flows of the SPE aren't easily observed. So how does one go about deriving their present value? Read More

The bottom line of EDHEC's study is that there is no need to create new public sector liabilities to get private sector institutions to invest in infrastructure. Read More

The new technologies make less difference than some might think. "Even back in the days of physical market makers, when things went bad, as for example in the crash of '87, the market makers would head for the hills," said James Angel. Nowadays the computers go dark. Or (worse) they don't.Read More

In a study of its own portfolio the Kauffman Foundation found that only twenty of 100 venture funds “beat a public-market equivalent by more than 3 percent annually”.Read More

Mark Casella, leader of the U.S. alternatives group at PwC, explains that no manager "ever wants to put gates up or to announce a suspension," and talks about how the contract provisions that provide for such powers have been modified of late. This is part of the broader issue of the alignment of interests.Read More

The reason for the increased interest in alternatives, McKinsey says, isn’t that the alternatives’ managers are slashing the price of their services. It is, rather, a discontent with the return to be gained from traditional investment. “Even with downward pressure likely over the next few years, revenue yields for institutional alternative products should remain well above the 35 bps average earned on today’s traditional institutional products.” Read More

Mark Casella, leader of the U.S. alternatives group at PwC, tells us why he thinks funds of funds still have a role to play in the future of the hedge fund industry, although "we have seen more and more institutions invest directly in hedge funds rather than through funds of funds." This is the first part of a two-part transcript of a broader discussion.Read More

The survey also asked that the asset managers state where their total assets are invested, using four geographical categories: Europe; Central/North America; Asia Pacific; Other. Commodity funds were easily the most heavily invested in C/NA, to the extent of 94 percent of their portfolios. Private equity funds are 61 percent invested in C/NA, and PE FoFs also have the majority of their portfolios there, at 54 percent.Read More

A veteran of hedge funds and private equity, Jeff Joseph offers some comments to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the JOBS Act and what this legislation has the potential to mean to the global alternative investment community.Read More

Acceleration Capital Group says that there were 1,113 new hedge funds in 2011 (and 775 funds liquidated). The increase in the number of supplicants has coincided with a 'decline in [the] traditional seed capital currently deployed by fewer dedicated seeders.'Read More

Institutions aren’t to be rushed into committing to a hedge fund. The process can take more than a year. Preqin asked institutions: once a fund has caught their attention, specifically once they have first seen a fund proposal, how much time typically passes before they actually make an investment, if they do?Read More

The return of assets to the realm of hedge funds comes with enhanced scrutiny. As Todd Groome, chairman of AIMA, says: “Following 2008, a much greater investor focus on liquidity, portfolio transparency, control and fund governance was clearly evident.” In common with legislative/regulatory changes, this requires transformation.Read More

A deeper look at alternatives with Dr. Bob Swarup, a world-renowned expert and commentator on alternatives and financial markets as well as being a visiting fellow at London School of Economics.Read More

A dollar invested in the PutWrite Index in 1986 would have been worth $12.53 in January 2011. That represents annualized growth of 10.4 percent. ACG concluded that such option writing strategy-based indexes “could appeal to investors who are concerned about low interest rates, increased volatility, illiquid investments, or sluggish stock market returns.”Read More

Although distressed“fire sales” are fewer in some periods than in others, it is true all around the business cycle that mutual fund managers face constraints related to the need “to cater to investors by investing in the hot stocks and by having a strong positive correlation between their flow and the value of the assets in which they invest,” as a new academic paper explains. Hedge funds, with their more professional investors, their deliberate opacity, and their constraints upon withdrawal, aren’t subject to those constraints. Thus, when mutual funds are constrained to follow a trend, hedge funds are in a position to be contrarians.Read More

According to its advocates, trend following as a strategy works from the premise that price trends represent a process of consensus building. As a new idea takes hold, "the earliest adopters of this idea place their trades in accordance with it" and they get to watch in satisfaction as "a growing mass of market participants adopts the same thesis. Early adopters can surf the wave to the beach.Read More

AllAboutAlpha catches up with Lauren Templeton, great niece of Sir John Templeton to discuss value investing and its alpha potential.Read More

The Internet and technology have changed the face of trading forever. To get a glimpse of the future we sat down with the oracles of The Daily Delphi to see what the next newest thing might be.Read More

Britain’s Private Finance Initiative has continued through the administrations since Blair’s, and indeed has inspired emulation across the Channel. At the same time, it has stirred up a good deal of criticism, and in November 2011 the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a plan to reform the PFI. One of the reform proposals is to seek broader participation by pension funds, or in pale bureaucratic jargon, “access a wider range of financing sources.”Read More

Reliance on optimization tools that in turn rely on standard “user risk factors” will make factor alignment worse, caution three executives of Axioma. An optimizer will cherry pick “the aspects of the model of expected returns that it deems desirable when gauged on the yardstick of marginal contribution to systemic risk.” This amounts to making, and betting on, the erroneous assumption that a lack of correlation with the used risk factors is a lack of systemic risk altogether.Read More

Funds of funds dominate the world of institutional investors in Day 1 or early stage (D1/ES) hedge funds, and they do so for a simple reason. That is their business model. They exist to invest in hedge funds, and their goal is to be fully invested at all times, not to have a lot of money sitting around as cash. Read More

The question in 2012 is not whether hedge funds (and other alternative investment vehicles) can attract pension funds, but how they should go about it. Alternatives managers will benefit most from the heightened interest of pension funds if they address the continuing concerns of their pension fund colleagues. For example, pension fund managers are well aware that investment in exotic and illiquid products is something hedge funds do, and they know that these products can help make a quick exit impossible. Read More

After a survey of recipients of the UCITS Alternative Index, the UAI Industry Survey Q1 2012, Alix Capital reports that majorities expressed satisfaction with the current level of allocation for certain strategies: commodities, emerging markets, forex, and macro global strategies. But there was a lot of interest in increasing allocations to CTAs, equity market neutral, and volatility-based strategies. The strategy that receives the largest negative response (largest intended reduction in portfolio allocation) is fixed income. Read More

One crucial takeaway from SEI's latest is that "the quality of operations is a major consideration in institutions' screening and evaluation of hedge funds." Eighty percent of respondents agreed with the observation that "operational strength is a hallmark of an institutional-quality hedge fund." One quarter of those say they agree "strongly." Only three percent disagree.Read More

Because of the furor over ABACUS and analogous transactions, the legislative mandate of the Volcker rule came to include a section 619, telling the SEC to ban underwriters or sponsors of asset-backed securities from engaging “in any transaction that would involve or result in any material conflict of interest with respect to any investor in a transaction arising out of such activity.” On Monday, February 13, the final day for comment on the proposed rule, some of the more fascinating comments spoke to this issue. Read More

From Lynne Feldman, Director of Marketing at the CAIA Association: Introducing CAIA Conversations, a series of interviews with leading alternative investment experts that showcases current viewpoints on the alternative assets covered by the CAIA curriculum. The series launches with Erik L. Knutzen, CAIA, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, NEPC, who commentsRead More

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