Second leg of the Boston hedge fund triathlon
Oct 18th, 2007 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Industry Trends, Institutional InvestingAfter a couple of power bars and a shot of orange Gatorade, conference-goers wearily made their way back into the Boston-area plenary hall that yesterday was the scene of a grueling 10 hour hedge fund marathon. On the agenda today: 130/30, risk, fund of hedge funds and commodities.
CAIA Association Executive Director Craig Asche fired the starter’s pistol at 7:32am by announcing the results from day one and introducing one of the titans of fixed income investing and 130/30 advocate, Morgan Stanley’s Marty Leibowitz.
One of league’s all-time leading point-getters
If Harry Markowitz is the Mick Jagger of finance, then Martin Leibowitz is the Wayne Gretzky - holder of many of hockey’s individual records. Like Gretzky, Leibowitz is the holder of several league records including the most number of articles published in the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal. He has also won consecutive Graham & Dodd Awards for financial writing and was the first inductee into the Fixed Income Analysts’ Society Hall of Fame. In his new book, “Capital Ideas Evolving”, Peter Bernstein dedicates an entire chapter to Leibowitz (see related posting) and Leibowitz, like Bernstein, has been the recipient of the CFA’s “Award for Professional Excellence”.
Leibowitz is the celebrated fixed income pioneer who spent the first 25 years of his career at Salomon Brothers, the next 10 years as the CIO of $300 billion pension giant TIAA-CREF and then joined Morgan Stanley in 2005. Today, he delivered a flurry of complex charts and tables that have become the hallmark of his 40 year career. But his message was clear: too much of the typical portfolio’s volatility comes from the market and not enough from manager skill (a.k.a. alpha, ”active risk”). (Amen)
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