As you can see, we did a bit of redecorating over the weekend.  But rest assured, you are looking at the same content and editorial direction we have followed for over 2 years.

The redesign was initiated, in part, because we felt the traditional blog format was too linear.  Regular readers will know that our objective isn’t to provide time-critical news, but to provide thoughtful analysis and commentary.   So a chronologically organized format never really made a lot of sense for us.   It provided us with a very limited opportunity to highlight key content after its day-long stint “above-the-fold” came to an end.  The new design allows us to display a significant number of stories on our home page so you don’t have to scroll through every post in order to find what you’re looking for.

We think this topic-centric organization will be more useful for you, the reader.  However, if you long for the good old days of linear blogging, just bookmark this page and you can read all of our posts in descending chronological order.

We also changed our software platform to accommodate the growing amount of information contained at AllAboutAlpha.com.  All of our content now exists in the form of WordPress posts, giving you much more flexibility.  Try searching for something and you will find not only regular blog posts, but also references to your search term in our Events, Hall of Fame, Resources, and Books sections - and if you are a full subscriber, even our research dossiers.  As of September 1, 2008, AllAboutAlpha.com contained a total of 1,082 posts.

As always, the most recent posts will continue to be free.  In addition, the first few paragraphs of all 600+ posts will be free.  But beginning today, we have implemented a subscription fee for access to the full text of all posts older than about 3 weeks.  For those of you who visit AllAboutAlpha.com every now and then to keep up with developments in the asset management industry, this won’t affect you.  But for those of you who use AllAboutAlpha.com as a research source for client presentations, consulting reports, academic/practitioner research, or to support strategic decision-making, we believe this subscription fee is a small price to pay in order to save yourself hours, or even days of research time.  (Essentially, we’ve done the research grunt work for you.)

This subscription will also provide access to our newly re-launched “Research Dossiers” containing nearly 200 PDF documents, four times the number we had on the old site (which is another reason behind the redesign).  Unlike typical libraries of white papers, these Research Dossiers are highly focused only on the topics we cover here at AllAboutAlpha.com (e.g. 130/30, portable alpha, hedge fund industry trends, alpha/beta separation etc.)  We also went out and hired a researcher who used to be one of the world’s foremost bloggers in his own right until regulatory requirements eventually meant he had to pack it in.  Since he remains active in the hedge fund industry, he’ll have to remain nameless for now.

…Which is sort of ironic since one of the other features of the new site is that its editor has “outted” himself (although it’s been an open secret for more than a year).   Why the nom de plume all this time?  Rather than making this website a personal diary, we always wanted the content to speak for itself.  But as Pensions & Investments recently observed, that anonymity also comes with drawbacks:

” All About Alpha bridges the gaps between alternative investment strategies, bringing them all together through engaging, informative articles…(a) perplexity is that the blogger remains anonymous, making it more difficult to measure the blog’s content against the founder’s agenda.”

Perhaps we’re not opportunistic enough.  But the truth is that we actually have no agenda other than to ask a lot of questions, learn, write and play a small role in the most dramatic change the investment industry has seen in generations.  Click here if you want to read more about “Alpha Male”.

So there you go.  The “new” AllAboutAlpha.com.  As always, please contact us with any feedback on this new site design or on any other aspect of AllAboutAlpha.com (including, above all, any remaining software bugs).