Browsing: Equity Hedge Funds

By Hossein Kazemi, PhD, CFA, CAIA Association, FDP Institute, and Isenberg School of Management Introduction Bobby Axelrod had a good day on June 10, 2018. On this day, Axe Capital’s manager took the podium in front of a group of institutional and high-net-worth investors to pitch his fund. Thirty minutesRead More

By Nicolas Rabener, CAIA, of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Investing in hedge funds is challenging as both strategies and fund structures are complex. Almost all strategies are cyclical, although not all are on the same cycle. For example, statistical arbitrage tends to perform best when volatility is high, however, that representsRead More

By Dinny McMahon, Economic Advisor to ShoreVest For the last few years, China has been involved in a slow-moving cleanup of its banking system, creating vibrant distressed debt and special situations opportunities for investors. Those opportunities have been heightened by the pandemic which is forcing banks to accelerate their paceRead More

By Nicolas Rabener, CAIA, Factor Research & Karl Rogers, ACE Capital Investments INTRODUCTION Anyone who has watched the hit TV show “Billions” will have noticed that the hedge fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod and his former lieutenant, and occasional nemesis, Taylor Mason have totally different trading styles. Bobby, although mathematically gifted,Read More

There’s an old joke. Even, if you like, a meta-joke. It probably dates back to vaudeville, and it takes the form of an exchange between the stage comic and a selected victim from the audience. It goes like this: Comic: Today’s your lucky day. I’m going to tell you theRead More

By Rick Roche, CAIA, Little Harbor Advisors, LLC Part 2 of a two-part series on The Alternative Imperative in the COVID Era. In Part 2, the author tackles notorious technology laggards. This piece transitions to alternative data pioneers (Alt-Venturers) and the 4-1-1 on Alt-Data: Hype or Hope? The author dispelsRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION There are folks in finance who know and folks who don’t know. The latter group often drives the former crazy by abusing terminology. For example, moderators and guests on CNBC talking about momentum and growth stocks as if they were the same thing.Read More

By Karl Rogers, ACE Capital Investments I recently finished a multi-strategy fund of hedge funds build for an institution where I focused on three sources of alpha: small manager, equities and commodities. Small Manager Alpha Given that “small” managers have been found to outperform their larger peers[1], why do manyRead More

By Rick Roche, CAIA, Managing Director of Little Harbor Advisors, LLC Part 1 of a two-part series on Alternative Investment Data (Alt-Data) in the COVID Era. In Part 1, the author makes the case for high-frequency, short-interval Alt-Data while discussing three primary drawbacks of interpreting official economic statistics amid aRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION In finance 101, there is usually little doubt on what constitutes the major asset classes in the investment industry, i.e. there are the traditional ones like equities or fixed income as well as alternatives like real estate or private equity. The instruments ofRead More

Economists in general, and scholars of finance in particular, have long been concerned with the “agency problem,” the conflict of interest inherent in any relationship where X is expected, and perhaps required by law or contract, to act in the best interest of Y. The problem exists because, for example,Read More

By Shana Sissel, CAIA, Spotlight Asset Group More than a decade ago the world of alternative investments witnessed hedge-fund-inspired Investment Act of 1940 (40 Act) funds appear on the scene. Much like their private alternative counterparts, liquid alternatives offer valuable diversification benefits within traditional portfolios, but it’s important to keepRead More

By Alex Botte, CFA, CAIA, Vice President, Two Sigma At the end of 2019, Two Sigma’s Venn platform added three new macro style factors to its risk model, the Two Sigma Factor Lens: Fixed Income Carry, Foreign Exchange Carry, and Trend Following. The first two factors are meant to capture anRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was a popular TV cartoon show in the 1980s, where a handsome Prince Adam was battling the evil Skeletor for control of the universe. Each time Prince Adam held the Sword of Power and boomed “ByRead More

A recent working paper for the European Corporate Governance Institute maintains that technology has the potential to make hedge funds and private equity more accessible to the retail investor. The paper, by Omololu Bajulaiye of Tilburg University, along with some other scholars begins with the non-controversial proposition that venture capital,Read More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Investing is akin to fighting in the forever war. There are long periods of peace and prosperity, but investors are frequently drawn into short-term combat, extended battles, and multi-year wars. And the cycle repeats over and over. For some of the foot soldiers,Read More

By Shreekant Daga, CAIA, CFA, FRM | Associate Director, Liaison Office, India | CAIA Association Sporting incidents at times draw similarities to financial matters. The below write-up compares and contracts one of the most famous cricket test matches and a Wall Street bet with a financial investment lens. The blog post takes form of aRead More

A co-founder of Quantigic Solutions has presented what he calls “the freshmanlevel” answer to the question: why did dollar-neutral quant trading strategies, such as equities stat arb, fail so markedly during the COVID-19 market sell-off? Zura Kakushadze, a professor at the Free University of Tblisi, is on reasonably solid groundRead More

By Hossein Kazemi, PhD, CFA, Senior Advisor at CAIA Association During the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the role of hedge funds and their potential to provide significant downside protection was hotly debated. The same debate has resurfaced earlier this year again when markets for risky assets experience double-digit declines withinRead More

By Masao Matsuda, CAIA, FRM, Founder, Crossgates Investment and Risk Management One would think hedge funds can weather market gyrations better than long-only equity investments as hedge funds have greater flexibility in determining the levels of market exposure.  However, while some individual hedge funds may have been successful in adverse marketRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM – Associate Director of Content Development at CAIA Association In the title reference, the character Dr. Emmett Brown says this about a bolt of lightning: “Unfortunately, you never know when or where it is ever gonna strike.” Frame of reference is everything when itRead More

By Nicolas Rabener, @FactorResearch INTRODUCTION Working in the restructuring team of a corporate finance boutique is like being a trader focused on short-selling. Most money is made when companies falter, and stocks turn bearish. A restructurer’s cyclical counterpart is the ever-optimistic merger & acquisition (M&A) banker that thrives when theRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association During CAIA Association’s most recent Virtual Chapter event, Keith and I (virtually) sat down with Chris Tidmore, CFA, CPA at The Vanguard Group to discuss Vanguard’s recent whitepaper, “The Wrapper Matters: Comparing Liquid Alternatives to Hedge Funds”Read More

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

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Scratching the surface of most people’s knowledge often does not reveal depth, but a lack thereof. When the former US Democratic candidates Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar were asked to name Mexico’s president, who is one the key counterparties for any US president,Read More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association, and Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director, Content Strategy at CAIA Association “Diversification is back” – now that’s not a phrase we’ve heard in a long time…long time. Considering recent market performance, we thought thatRead More

A recent paper by a scholar at Tilburg University and a market participant at Robeco outlines the difficulties that the hedge fund industry has faced over the last decade. These problems arose, at least in part, from the democratization of alternative investing. There are three important challenges to the hedgeRead More

A long-running drama continues over Xerox’ desire to buy HP. Xerox upped the ante early in the new year, announcing that it has secured binding financing commitments in the amount of $24 million. The dispute, with long-time shareholder activist Carl Icahn at its center, shows that: (a) the corporate worldRead More

It is reasonable to expect that a diversified hedge fund portfolio will make more modest returns in 2020 than it did in 2019, according to Agecroft Partners, which has done its usual January crystal-ball gazing on the new year, looking for the top industry trends and how they may playRead More

NMC Health, an Abu Dhabi-based firm listed on the London Stock Exchange, has suffered a sharp loss in value as a consequence of its dispute with a forensic short seller, Carson Block, the man behind Muddy Waters Research. Block has bet against the stock because he believes that it isRead More

Eurekahedge’s latest monthly report includes a special section on the key trends in European hedge funds. It tells us that the total number of European hedge funds grew in 2019, after a decline in each of the four years before (2015 – 2018). In other words, although in recent yearsRead More

Until the final days of 2019, it has been a quiet year for high-frequency trading-related news. The whole concept of a trade executed in nanoseconds, and the related concept of a trading program managed with only sporadic human intervention or oversight, have all faded into background assumptions. What remains isRead More

Liquified natural gas has long been sold through long-term contracts that are benchmarked to the price of crude oil. This makes a certain intuitive sense. The two commodities are in many contexts substitutes, so that one would expect a rise in the prices of one to inspire an echoing riseRead More

A new report from Schroders looks at global convertible bonds, instruments that straddle the boundaries of debt/equity/derivatives. It tells us—in a discussion that might be of interest to the portfolio managers of relative value hedge funds—that these bonds have come back into fashion due to the higher volatility of 2019Read More

In a new paper, three quants with Robeco suggest that the “short” side of the activity of many long/short equity trades is pointless. These quants are David Blitz, Guido Baltussen, who is also affiliated with Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and Pim Van Vliet. They have broken down the common equity factorRead More

Carlos Salas Najera, of the New York City Data Science Academy, has tested an old idea (pairs trading) for a strategy that could be tailored to energy stocks and related ETFs. The resulting paper is “Pairs Trading and VAR Analysis Applied to Energy Stocks.” His latest paper, though, has aRead More

Prime brokers help funds of hedge funds identify hedge funds, which creates what the authors of a new paper call a PB bias. This means that portfolios are overweighted to the hedge funds serviced by the connected prime brokers. The scholars tested (and confirmed) the intuitive hypothesis that the biasRead More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up 0.31% in October. However, it doesn’t measure up to the market next to the MSCI ACWI (Local), which ended October up 1.93%. Eurekahedge’s latest monthly report observes that US-China trade talks resumed, and this led to a certain tentative optimism. Since those areRead More

The phrase “books and records” hardly suggests excitement. Yet, the cliched corporate lawyers’ phrase is not without payoff, either. Activist hedge funds are always interested in ammunition that will help them shake up entrenched managements and unlock value. The question often arises during the resultant fights: when does an activist/dissidentRead More

Machine learning as a way of managing a portfolio is a “wave of the future” with a lot of sea to cover before it breaks on the shore. Meson Capital Partners has sent its investors an update and summary for 2019 Q3 regarding its managed market neutral fund, and thisRead More

Matthew X. Hanauer and Steffen Windmueller, two scholars affiliated with the Technical University of Munich, compare the performance of three risk management approaches applicable to the momentum strategy. Their new paper also explores the risk management techniques available for hedge fund managers and others who pursue a momentum strategy. ARead More

Hedge funds recently are interested in taking the long position on Telenav (NASDAQ: TNAV). According to Insider Monkey, the number of hedge funds with positions in TNAV rose from eight to 13 at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2017. Then it slid gradually back to eight overRead More

A recent publication from Fidelity Institutional Asset Management, while looking at the money markets in the US, emphasizes that investors are looking for liquidity. The report, written by Kerry Pope and Chris Lewis, each an institutional portfolio manager with FIAM, begins with a discussion of the Federal Reserve’s September rateRead More

Burford Capital, a New York-based company, provides litigation finance. This is a subject of endless debate, especially among members of the plaintiffs’ bar. The old-style plaintiffs’ lawyer simply says “no, thank you” to any potential client without the financial wherewithal to bear the costs of an action, especially if theRead More

Willem Kooyker is folding up his tent at Blenheim Capital, the commodities-focused hedge fund headquartered in an office park in Berkeley Heights, N.J. Kooyker is a legend. In 1981, he went to work at Commodities Corp., Princeton, N.J., where he was a peer of Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, andRead More

A new paper in the Journal of Economics and Business presents data on merger arb, and which factors, especially sector size and individual fund size, do or do not have an impact on the alpha available in the pursuit of this strategy. For a given time period, the total dollar amountRead More

Larry Tabb, in a piece in the Financial Times, has defended the controversial practice of payment for order flow (PFOF). Let’s start with PFOF and why it’s controversial. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority defined PFOF in a recent white paper as the practice in which an investment firm, typically aRead More

According to the latest report from Eurekahedge, the world’s hedge funds recorded a net growth of $3.4 billion due to performance in September 2019. On the other hand, September also saw large net outflows of $6.2 billion. Assets at the end of the month were down 0.12%.  Looking at fundsRead More

The “volatility effect,” also known as the “low-risk effect,” is the subject of a new paper from Robeco. The gist of the “effect” is this: low-risk stocks “should” show a lesser return than high-risk stocks. The Capital Asset Pricing Model predicts a linear relationship between the risk of a securityRead More

Zane Swanson, an accounting professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, has been at work on a fascinating new approach to the valuation of firms and the valuation of their equity shares. This approach may be of great interest to risk arb hedge funds. Swanson is working with an establishedRead More