Posts Tagged ‘ Alpha Strategies ’
Long Alpha and Activist Strategies
Mar 27th, 2020 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Strategies, Newly Added, Alpha Strategies, Event-Driven Hedge Funds, CAIA Alternative Viewpoints, Hedge FundsBy 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
What hath CalPERS Wrought? And Why?
Sep 30th, 2014 | Filed under: Institutional Investing, FeesShould 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
IEA Says Investment In Clean Energy Will Keep Growing, Slowly
Sep 2nd, 2014 | Filed under: Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Alternative energyGuest 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
Hedge Fund Branding Continues to Drive a Majority Of Asset Flows
Aug 14th, 2014 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry TrendsGuest columnist Don Steinbrugge looks at why the same hedge fund firms consistently bring in the assets.Read More
Advancing the Infrastructure Investment Narrative
Aug 11th, 2014 | Filed under: Infrastructure, Alpha Strategies, InsolvencyIntuitively, 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
Investing in Britain’s Infrastructure: With and Without Guarantees
Jan 28th, 2013 | Filed under: Infrastructure, Institutional InvestingThe 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
People as Market Makers Were Never Crash Insurance Either
Aug 30th, 2012 | Filed under: Algorithmic and high-frequency trading, Alpha StrategiesThe 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
Kauffman Hits VC Returns, LP Dupes, and J Curve Mythology
Aug 29th, 2012 | Filed under: Private Equity, Institutional Investing, Alpha Strategies, Venture capitalIn 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
Casella on Future of Hedge Fund Industry, Part Two
Aug 2nd, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha StrategiesMark 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
McKinsey: Allocations Will Rise Despite Sticky Fees
Jul 31st, 2012 | Filed under: Real Estate, Private Equity, Alpha Strategies, Asset allocationThe 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 on the Future of Hedge Fund Industry: Part One
Jul 30th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha StrategiesMark 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
More than $3 Trillion AUM for Top 100 Alternative Investment Managers
Jul 25th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Real Estate, Private Equity, Hedge Fund Strategies, Infrastructure, Institutional Investing, Alpha StrategiesThe 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
Dear SEC: Comments on the JOBS Act
Jul 19th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Regulation, Real Estate, Private Equity, RegulatoryA 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
ACG: Intense Competition for Seed Money
Jul 12th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Seeding/early-stageAcceleration 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
Preqin to Hedge Funds: Wooing Institutions May Require Patience
Jun 27th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Strategies, Asset allocationInstitutions 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
PwC: Open Books Will Rebuild Trust for Hedge Funds
Jun 26th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Institutional InvestingThe 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
Alpha Hunters: Looking at Alternative Investments From the Inside Out
Jun 7th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Real Estate, Private Equity, Hedge Fund Strategies, CTA, Derivatives, Institutional Investing, Alpha Hunters, Alpha Strategies, Venture capital, ForexA 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
Selling Options: Strategies and Results
Jun 6th, 2012 | Filed under: Alpha Strategies, Risk managementA 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
Not Just Fire Sales: Contrarian Hedge Funds Find Alpha
Apr 16th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Strategies, Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesAlthough 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
A Paradox: Avoid Correlation by Following the Trends
Apr 2nd, 2012 | Filed under: Commodities, CTA, Institutional InvestingAccording 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
Alpha Hunter Lauren Templeton on Generating Alpha from Value Investing
Mar 29th, 2012 | Filed under: Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesAllAboutAlpha catches up with Lauren Templeton, great niece of Sir John Templeton to discuss value investing and its alpha potential.Read More
Conversing with the Oracles of The Daily Delphi
Mar 26th, 2012 | Filed under: Algorithmic and high-frequency tradingThe 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
Pension Funds and Blair’s PFI Legacy
Mar 21st, 2012 | Filed under: Infrastructure, Social investing, Institutional InvestingBritain’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
Axioma to Quants: Beware of Cherry Picking by Optimizers
Mar 15th, 2012 | Filed under: Algorithmic and high-frequency tradingReliance 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
What Do Day-One/Early-Stage Investors Want?
Mar 12th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Strategies, Seeding/early-stageFunds 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
PwC on Public Pension Managers Who ‘Do’ Hedge Funds
Mar 5th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Hedge Fund Strategies, Institutional Investing, Alpha Strategies, FeesThe 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
Alix Capital: Market Neutral Up, Fixed Income Down
Feb 29th, 2012 | Filed under: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
The Shifting Hedge Fund Landscape: Operations and Due Diligence
Feb 28th, 2012 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Institutional Investing, Alpha StrategiesOne 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
The Volcker Rule: Return of the Fabulous Fab
Feb 20th, 2012 | Filed under: RegulatoryBecause 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
Video: Erik Knutzen of NEPC Speaks on the Role of Alternatives
Feb 12th, 2012 | Filed under: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 Hunters: Viewing Asia from Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Jan 31st, 2012 | Filed under: Alpha Hunters, Alpha StrategiesAlpha Hunter Khiem Do talks about Asia and where the alpha is from his perspective.Read More