Browsing: Liquid Alternative Investiments

ETFs are one of the routes by which once alternative and elite-access-only strategies have become democratized or gone retail. As a result of this trend, we have synthetic ETFs, smart beta ETFs, leveraged ETFs, and inverse ETFs. A recent study study provides some reassurance about concerns that have motivated kickbackRead 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 Beth Anne Byrne and Kara O’Halloran, FS Investments Warren Buffett’s famous quote reads “You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out”. The tide is most certainly out now, and many portfolios have been exposed. The historic bull market has ended, and with it theRead More

A recent paper by two legal scholars warns of the absence of transparency, of the opacity, that investors may face in ESG funds and ESG exchange-traded funds. “Buyer Beware: Variation and Opacity in ESG ad ESG Index Funds,” is the work of Dana Brackman Reiser and Anne M. Tucker, whoRead 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

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch @FactorResearch INTRODUCTION Investors seeking exposure to global equities with a low carbon footprint could consider the iShares MSCI ACWI Low Carbon ETF (CRBN) or SPDR MSCI ACWI Low Carbon ETF (LOWC). CRBN has $500 million of assets under management, compared with $90 million for LOWC.Read More

In 2015 the United Nations defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals [no poverty, no hunger, health & well-being, etc.] along with 169 targets that were devised to allow for quantitative measurement of progress. It also set 2030 as the bull’s eye for the attainment of the goals. Since governments alone areRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM – Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Whether it’s that some retail versions of alternative investments have not lived up to their private counterparts, or that retail investors may be last in the buffet line for private placements, there are several arguments againstRead More

The brief history of replication funds may already be divided into three waves, the third of which is still in formation. The first wave was about democratization: putting hedge fund strategies in the hands of people who cannot meet the accreditation requirements to invest in hedge funds proper, or ofRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Central Issue of the Paper If you’re a social media junkie, you have probably seen “#goals” in your timeline. In most cases, the hashtag is referring to an attractive couple or an aesthetically pleasing plate of food.Read More

Sustainability-sensitive investing has a net positive impact on performance, according to a paper released by Robeco. According to the paper written by Chris Berkouwer, a Robeco equity analyst, ESG was responsible for 20% of the outperformance of a Robeco fund over a period of three years. His findings are presentedRead More

By Bill Kelly, CAIA Association CEO In the interest of brevity, I am going to skip the salutation and get right to the heart of the matter. As my name implies, I am Leery of the lofty promises that depend on solving our long-term problems and I do remain inRead More

By Guest Contributor Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development The death of the 60/40 may be a welcome change for multi-asset investors who understand that exposure to risk premia is perhaps a far better long-term investment strategy. Diversification remains an important facet of asset allocation, but weRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) Beta is like ice cream and comes in many flavors. Broadly we can categorize it into the following four types: Plain beta: Market capitalization-weighted benchmark indices like the S&P 500 or FTSE 100. Smart beta: Indices with tilts to factors backed by academic andRead More

By Bill Kelly, CAIA Association CEO The American history buffs out there will know that we are just a few short weeks away from the 246th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Back in 1773, the British government was deep in debt and decided the very best course was toRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association How do you turn a millennial into a capitalist? Sell her SNAP in the post-IPO market. A little hindsight here shows how ridiculous this all looked. The initial sellers of the shares were the founders and their VCs (just under 30% of the offering),Read More

Negative interest rate policy—that is, central bank arrangements that seek to inspire spending by punishing savings, not merely in real but in nominal terms—have spread in recent years among the developed economies, and are now in use in Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Eurozone. Denmark got the ball rolling inRead More

Someone told me that it’s all happening At the Zoo. In this case, it was Paul Simon in his 1967 title song where he anthropomorphizes the animals he sees in the Central Park Zoo. Some are deemed to be honest, some kindly but dumb, and some insincere or skeptical, and,Read More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION The mafia and the hedge fund industry share some characteristics. Both are powerful, non-transparent, and create little value for society. Naturally the mafia is a criminal organization while the only “criminal” element of hedge funds are the high fees they are charging forRead More

Shakespeare’s Juliet once famously asked “what’s in a name?” If you know the play, she was talking about roses and how they would smell as sweet, even if they had an alternative name. Would her modern-day self not ask the same about data? And what makes today’s alt-data different fromRead More

Milind Sharma and Aravind Ganesan have developed what they call the QMIT Leveraged Buyout Model—a trading strategy—based on anticipating announcements of LBOs based on QMIT’s factor library. Sharma is the CEO of QMIT, QuantZ Machine Intelligence Technologies. QMIT is itself a spin-off from QuantZ Capital, which is a stat arbRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION When pitching an investment product with a backtested history the frequent response from potential investors is that they have never seen a bad backtest. Naturally this is true as there is no point in marketing a strategy with a poor backtest as investorsRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association Ask someone of a certain generation to name the most common worldwide distress signal, and they will likely come back with SOS. No surprise then that this same signal, borne from the Morse code, turns 111 years old on this date in history. MostRead More

A new paper by Sean Markowicz, a strategist at Schroders, looks into the possibility that fund flows into the assets generically called smart beta are having detrimental consequences for the financial system. It also sheds some light on investors’ bad timing regarding ETFs. The assets at issue are, according toRead More

FTSE Russell has posted its sixth annual survey of global asset owners’ views of smart beta. Smart beta is a strategy that uses indexes, but that is not traditionally cap-weighted, that is, one where the construction of the index itself incorporates the investment strategy, capturing investment factors or market inefficiencies.Read More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Investing is challenging as it is complex and complicated, which requires continuous learning and updating of mental frameworks. Conflicts and contradictions are found everywhere. For example, data from the mutual fund industry shows that most funds fail to outperform their benchmarks, but investors inRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION As Amazon has been decimating large parts of the retail industry over the last two decades, ETFs have done the equivalent to the mutual fund industry in the financial world. Today ETFs are covering nearly all areas of the markets, no matter howRead More

A sound “portfolio optimization strategy” is one that takes into consideration how its assets are behaving in the bad times, those that represent the left-side tail of the bell curve. This is not all that novel an idea, but Maria Kartsakli and Felix Schlumpf, Zurich Insurance Company executives, give itRead More

A new article by Dave Dowsett and Heather Wied, both of Invesco, looks at blockchains and the way this new technology, precisely as it divorces itself from its original significance as a feature of the cryptocurrencies, is ready to transform finance. Dowsett and Wied contend that blockchain “offers the possibilityRead More

A new paper by Ilias Filippou and two other scholars looks at ETF arbitrage. This is a trading strategy that plays off of discrepancies between the value of the exchange-traded funds on the one hand and the value of their underlying stocks on the other. ETF arb is not new,Read More

Scotiabank recently released what it calls a “high-level guide for mutual fund companies interested in launching liquid alternative products.” The creation of this guide was stimulated by a reform of the regulations of the Canadian Securities Administrators, aimed at making liquid alternatives more readily available to investors in Canada. OnRead More

LPL Financial’s 2018 Forum Conference for investors took place in Boston this week, Sunday through Tuesday. This is an annual event that brings together thousands of advisors and program managers to discuss industry issues and new products. LPL is an independent broker-dealer headquartered in Boston, with offices in Fort Mill,Read More

Some of the leading figures in the alt investment industry have put their dignified heads together and created a vision statement, called “Perspectives: Industry Leaders on the Future of the Hedge Fund Industry.” The gist of the paper is that firms in the industry are quickly adapting to contemporary conditionsRead More

By Diane Harrison Technology advances have infiltrated every corner of finance, including the world of wealth management. While few can argue with the positives of automated, algorithm-based portfolio management platforms, the advent of the cost-efficient, dispassionate robo-advisor has struck fear into the heart of many a financial advisor and fundRead More

David Blitz has recently discussed the concern in some quarters that factor premiums may disappear as they are arbitraged away by exchange-traded funds. Blitz, the head of quantitative equity research at Robeco Asset Management, says that such a concern is not justified, because “the exposures of ETFs that may beRead More

State Street Global Advisers has put out a “Complete Guide to Smart Beta.” A preface by Lynn S. Blake explains that the focus of the paper is not on equity products but on “exciting new developments in the fixed income world.” Within that space, multi-factor strategies will proliferate going forward.Read More

State Street Global Advisors has a new paper out that seeks to help State Street clients “refine their own strategic asset allocation” especially insofar as their portfolios include smart beta investments, by explaining how State Street forecasts returns, and where the forecasts as to some of the factor returns standRead More

Jason Williams, senior vice president at Lazard Asset Management, has written a white paper on the “six sins of smart beta.” First: what is smart beta? Academic studies indicate anomalies in the markets that somehow don’t get arbitraged away.  These become identified as “factors” and indexes can be designed soRead More

Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 6, Issue 1 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 Membership while archived issues are available to the public in the Perspectives section atRead More

The auditing giant KPMG says in a recent report on merger and acquisition activity in the alternative asset management world that there was a dip in activity in this space in 2015, that there was a rebound “to more normalized levels” in 2016, and that the momentum off of thatRead More

For four years now, FTSE Russell has surveyed global institutions, asking about their interest in smart beta indexes and about their allocations to investable products based on same. The 2017 survey results are in. The new survey finds (as did the earlier ones) that risk reduction, return enhancement, and improvedRead More

Late last year a California state court found that the plaintiffs in a class action suit stated a cause of action when they alleged that the defendant, iShares Trust, had failed to disclose the material risk of using market or stop loss orders in connection with ETFs. This spring theRead More

This is the first of a series of articles on smart beta. By Scott Opsal, The Leuthold Group Understanding Factor Returns And Market Conditions Quantitative investing has become an integral component of professional investment management, and smart beta funds have become popular vehicles for advisors as they assemble actively-managed clientRead More

Beachhead Capital Management has published a white paper on what it calls the “second generation of liquid alternatives.” To begin at the beginning, “liquid alternatives” are investment products, available to retail investors, for example through mutual funds or ETFs, which are designed to provide the diversification and absolute-return benefits typicallyRead More

By Scott Opsal, CFA Director of Equities, The Leuthold Group The widespread popularity of smart beta ETFs demonstrates that factor-based investing has advanced from the province of academia to rank among the most popular investment strategies for institutional and retail investors. Originally of interest to researchers looking to test, andRead More

A recent Columbia Business School research paper looks into the transaction costs associated with smart beta strategies in order to estimate the capacity of each strategy. The three authors of the report are all affiliated with asset manager BlackRock Inc. They are: Ronald Ratcliffe, Paolo Miranda, and Andrew Ang. RatcliffeRead More

The market for liquid alternatives continues to grow and adapt. On St. Valentine’s Day of this year, ABR Dynamic Funds announced that it was launching its first Irish-domiciled UCITS V fund. Maybe it should have waited until St. Patrick’s Day? At any rate, the fund “seeks U.S. participation in aRead More

A new report from State Street Corporation and the Alternative Investment Management Association says that nearly half of the market participants surveyed believe that decreased market liquidity is a secular change, not a cyclical one: that is, that it is a climate that is here to stay, not a rainRead More

A paper by Xiaowei Kang and Daniel Ung, published in June 2014, remains timely because risk parity and related approaches remain the center of controversy and some confusion. The Kang & Ung paper looked at three approaches to risk factor based portfolio construction, studying specifically the practical aspects of theRead More

A new paper from Neuberger Berman, an employee owned private investment firm that’s been part of the New York scene since 1939, makes the case that long/short equity strategies are “worth consideration as part of an investor’s equity allocation and the overall investment mix.” The paper is written by JulianaRead More