Browsing: Alpha Hunters

On Nov. 13, the 24th Annual National Pension and Institutional Investment Summit convenes in Dallas Texas. CAIA is a sponsor of this event. Panayiotis Lambropoulos, portfolio manager of hedge funds at the Employees Retirement System of Texas, will offer his insights at a panel on emerging hedge fund managers. Lambropoulos’Read More

Presumably the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, in December 2008, that states can in fact make and enforce tougher labeling standards for cigarettes than does the federal government was a negative for tobacco stocks. But did that mean that stock prices had already anticipated the decision before it happened? or that they immediately adjusted downward on the morning the decision was announced? Or ... neither of those? Read More

Guest columnist Charles Skorina looks at the potential for 2016 endowment returns and finds them to be somewhat lacking... Could alternatives ride to the rescue?Read More

Not all benefits are as tangible as a suitcase of cash, and the question of law for the Second Circuit, for the Ninth, and now perhaps for SCOTUS is: is friendship enough? how about regard for one's brother? Read More

The CFTC has issued its first exemption from the CDO registration mandate under 5b (h). The successful petition for that exemption, from ASX Clear, has the additional merit of having inspired an idiosyncratic seeming, but concise, comment letter, quoted in full here. Read More

Guest columnist Charles Skorina with a cautionary tale of greed and deceit and less-than-best practices at a large public pension plan.Read More

Obamacare's impact on the investment world may have been mitigated until very recently by the protracted and complicated litigation that the law immediately generated starting with its enactment in 2010. But now.... Read More

Credit Suisse Capital Services says that appetite has increased of late, among institutional investors, for multistrategy funds. Faille offers some thoughts as to why. Read More

The authors of a new study of the relationship between fund size and performance employ a database consisting of 7,261 funds and their performance over a twenty year period (1994 to 2014). Spoiler alert: size is bad. Especially in a crisis.Read More

Meredith Jones' book on investing in women takes it to the Street and comes back with some solid conclusions.Read More

Low interest rates and record equity valuations together mean that companies can use either stock swaps or borrowed cash or a combination of the two, to buy one another. Further, corporate executives infer that they have to keep buying in order not to become a target themselves. Read More

Larry Fink is "deeply worried" that the combination of share repo with high-yield debt is "one of the reasons why we have a below trend-line economy. We're not investing in the future as much as we should." Carl Icahn, predictably, has a very different view of what ails us. Read More

Charles Skorina looks at the new crew at NYU.Read More

Andrew Beer continues his discussion on slashing hedge fund fees without burning yourself or your clients.Read More

Managers who offer funds that provide shorter time frames to investment exits, greater liquidity through a hedge fund structure, and employ the event-driven skill set that identifies and manages an investment portfolio yielding private equity-like returns are finding increased interest from an investment community seeking returns married with reasonable liquidity. Read More

Charles Skorina presents his annual CEO compensation report and a little bit more.Read More

Faille is struck by a brief passage in the recent Nortel decision (the Delaware side of the Delaware/Ontario concord over allocation) that suggests the degree to which the United States dominates the patent-granting as well as the patent-litigating world. Like what the U.K. is for defamation.... Read More

For Faille, the stand-out essay in this collection of case studies, from CNBC's Maneet Ahuja, concerns Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner, of the Avenue Capital Group. As Myron Scholes says in his afterword to this volume, Lasry and Gardner take returns from those whose demand for liquidity makes them willing to give them up. Read More

Guest columnist Andrew Beer looks at alpha.Read More

The integration of data isn't fully on the hedge fund industry radar yet. Yet it may be critical to rebuilding manager-investor relations via whiz-bang 21st century technology. Read More

Intrepid contributor Doug Friedenberg addresses a burning nomenclatural issue for the investment style formerly known as hedge funds and proposes a solution to save the financial system.Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison on investment lessons learned on the golf course.Read More

SPM "sticks out in [his] mind" as a successful manager with a "17 year track record" with returns in the mid 20s. "Where else are you going to get that?" Well, there is at least one other place that then comes to Brian Shapiro's thoughts: SPM's return compares to the return available from Elliott.Read More

Charles Skorina looks at the top public endowments and discusses performance with Erik Lundberg.Read More

Why has Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, hired former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke as a Senior Advisor? This decision represents a surprise given Griffin's views on "quantitative easing," views he forcefully expressed a couple of years ago. Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison looks at the world of alternatives to alternatives, including stamps, cars, farmland and more...Read More

The hapless U.S. mutual funds Chen and Gallagher sample have a nominally positive pre fee alpha only when measured against CAPM. That disappears into the negatives when the baseline used is the Fama-French model, and deeper into the negatives when the momentum factor is added. Read More

The impression one gets from some of the recent work of Dr. Makin is of a man who decided, late in life, that currency is a state invention, and that the states deputize their central banks to make sure the rest of us use it properly. Read More

Intralinks is confident that the ongoing growth in M&A activity will continue through the 2d quarter, fueled by strong performances in EMEA and North America. In North America in particular the drivers include low interest rates and pressure on corporate honchos to generate growth in that low-rate environment. Read More

Guest columnist Donald Steinbrugge, CFA, looks at the bad rap hedge funds have gotten and talks about why it's not deserved.Read More

Investors in hedge funds want more transparency than they think they're getting, a fact that might not be clear to their managers. Read More

Funds of funds are quite different entities from single-manager funds from the point of view of the number of women in senior C-suite roles. Different in what direction? That depends upon the country under consideration. Read More

Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, looks at the relationships between public and private real estate.Read More

The most important turning points of our lives tend to have consequences for our alpha seeking. A new paper gives us some insight into what those consequences are, and how they vary as to strategies.Read More

By Brad Case, PhD, CFA, CAIA This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the strengths of different indices that are published regularly and may be appropriate for benchmarking, risk assessment, and other real estate investment purposes. The first article focused on two similar index families, the Moody’s/RCARead More

To the extent that high-frequency trading is analogized to 'insider trading,' it may be in trouble with securities regulators but still in the clear with commodities regulators. After all, the latter do allow hedgers to use non-public material information to protect themselves. But Gregory Scopino doesn't believe pinging and related HFT practices should be in the clear with the CFTC at all. Read More

The hedge fund universe has become a much more complicated place since 2008. The old-school hedge funds offering only quarterly redemptions with at least one month notice are no longer the only option for those seeking alternatives plays. And those who are seeking such plays may be somewhat confused by the proliferation of possibilities. Read More

As the CEO of AIMA, Jack Inglis, said: Many pension-fund trustees "are asking questions about their existing or prospective hedge fund allocations. Rarely has there been such demand for a realistic assessment of the benefits – and also the risks – associated with hedge fund investing.” The AIMA and CAIA are working together to meet that demand in a series of papers.Read More

In a fascinating review article, Sannikov and his co-authors distinguished among the sorts of liquidity, and thus identified the precise sort of liquidity mismatch likely to lead to market shocks. In a working paper last year, Sannikov took on the issue of executive pay, incentives, and claw-backs. Read More

Guest columnist Don Steinbrugge, CFA, surveys institutional investors and hedge funds to find out what the top trends may be for 2015.Read More

Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, guest columnist, continues his series on U.S. real estate benchmarks as he looks at the NCREIF Property Index.Read More

In the middle of the year now ending, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered as complete a victory as it could manage to the hold-out bondholders in the Argentine-default dispute. Enforcement efforts plod on, and it seems likely a related story could make our top five list next year, too. Read More

In Part One Faille discussed the Newman/Chiasson decision of a three-judge panel of the appeals court. In this follow-up, he discussed consequences, starting (but not ending) with the good news this offers Michael Steinberg. Read More

Guest columnist Doug Friedenberg explores Nigeria as a frontier market.Read More

A three-judge panel of the appeals court instructed the district court to "dismiss the indictment with prejudice as it pertains to Newman and Chiasson." Here we discuss why. in the second part, we'll discuss the likely consequences. Read More

According to a new report from Intralinks and Cass Business School, M&A activity is a critical component in how successful companies innovate and enhance shareholder value. Actavis' latest coup, rescuing Allergan from the clutches of Valeant and Pershing Square, may make the report's authors' point more vividly than their dry numbers can. Read More

Guest columnist Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, examines the differences between private and public real estate investments.Read More

n a new book, Charlotte Beyer tells investors that having the right advisor isn't suckerdom. It can in fact be insurance against suckerdom. So: how does an investor find the right advisor? Read More

Guest columnist Vikas Shah speaks to Nobel Prize winning economist, Professor Alvin E. Roth about market re-design.Read More

The convergence of a central banker and micro financiers at a recent ceremony in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea inspires a look at where the MFI industry stands, and where it is headed. Read More