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Endowments and foundations typically are considered the early adopters in alternative investments. Watch this video with CAIA Association's Director of Curriculum Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, as he explains the different structures of endowments and foundations and why they are uniquely geared for successful alternative investing.
Operational risk within investment management firms can stem from many sources. Firms also have varying tolerance levels for accepting or handling such risk. SEI believes virtually every firm can benefit from taking a fresh look at common areas of risk and consider the variety of relatively straightforward risk management measures that can readily be deployed. In that spirit, SEI put together a 10-part guide as an effective risk management tool to set the foundation for operational excellence. Below are excerpts ...
By Charles Skorina In our last letter we took a hard look at recent investment performance among the eight Ivy League endowments. [See NL44 at http://www.charlesskorina.com/775/] As a bonus we added four "Alt-Ivys" to round it up to an even dozen. These are all, of course, privately-funded institutions. Now, we turn to the cream of our state-supported schools, the twelve Public Ivys. The traditional Private Ivy endowments, including Harvard and Yale, get lots of scrutiny for obvious reasons. They control a lot of money; they're ...
The recent rumors that George Soros was involved in a big way in the fall off the Australian dollar sent us back to the good old days of Soros’s notoriety, the 1992 deal that forced the Brits to pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and that is always invoked to explain why they aren’t in the euro to this day.
Actually, even if we assume the rumors are accurate, the two situations are very different. But it is difficult to find any news reports that don’t draw a rather ...
The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed on May 1 a new set of rules and interpretive guidance to ease the concerns of some overseas parties and regulators over cross-border security-based swaps.
This is an extremely complicated proposal, taking up 650 pages, designed to clarify the significance of Title VII, the swap-markets-specific portion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It may set the stage for further tension between the SEC on the one hand and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has taken a very different view of ...
A recent publication on merger arbitrage strategies makes the case that global M&A activity will “remain muted” despite some bright spots.
PrevInvest, which describes itself as offering “leading intelligence and independent insight,” cited Dealogic in saying that M&A activity fell in 2012, 3% from 2011 for all deals. But there was some pick-up in the first quarter 2013, with a surge of megadeals in the U.S. in particular. Notably, competing bidders have turned Michael Dell’s attempt to go private with his corporate alter ego into an auction.
On February 5, Dell announced ...
D.J. Johnstone, a professor at the University of Sydney Business School in Sydney, Australia, is re-working the capital asset pricing model in accordance with probability theory. I wrote recently about one recent essay of his, on the “Bayesian understanding” of probability theory. Today, I would like to fill out those thoughts. I will allude to two of his other recent articles as I go.
Simple versions of CAPM often graph the expected return as a function of beta, thus creating the security market line, as portrayed at the top of this ...
The Alternative Investment Fund Managers’ Directive comes into effect in the European Union this July. Accordingly, Global Perspectives has posted the first part of a planned two-part white paper about compliance. One of the major points the report makes is that this is an EU development that is necessarily a matter of concern far from Europe’s shores. The author, Shane Brett, is no stranger to readers of AllAboutAlpha, and he has helped us keep track of ...
Clifford S. Asness and two associates have made the case in a recent paper not only that a strategy of betting against beta (BAB) can yield positive returns, but that its success in doing so is not the consequence of a preference that the strategy creates for certain industries over others. This contravenes the interpretation that certain earlier authors, including for example Ronald Shah of Dimensional Fund Advisers, have given to the success of BAB. Stated ...
Questions abound about the structures of exchanges, the prevalence of off-exchange platforms, and the infrastructure of trading and execution across a wide range of securities and assets. What is more, the cauldron in which these questions boil and bubble gets hotter every time there is some high-visibility wood brought to the fire such as (just to take examples from recent days): a false report on a hacked AP Twitter account that causes the (brief but ...
By Louis Lovas, Director of Solutions, OneMarketData If there’s one thing firms must have a strong grasp on in the financial markets, it’s data. These days, data comes from every direction possible, and it comes quickly. But to take full advantage of the ocean of information rushing toward you requires getting a handle on data and then finding meaning within the data to capitalize on opportunities. We live in what I call the new normal, defined ...
