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All is calm and good on the surface of the hedge fund industry, with AUM collectively continuing to rise. Underneath, however, are some gyrations that are changing the composition of alternatives fairly dramatically.
Hedge funds' ability to persevere and thrive following the past few years is a sign they'll be around for the long haul - a sentiment confirmed by Rothstein Kass's latest annual hedge fund survey.
Some types of alpha have a sting in the tail: they hibernate or head south when tail risks appear, while other types of alpha thrive on panics. Crisis alpha is about celebrating low Sharpe ratios, and looking beyond price volatility to gauge risk.
The University of Texas endowment recently revealed that it had nearly $1 billion of gold hidden away in their basement. This might be a good time to revisit whether US endowments are really that smart.
Private equity managers arguably bit off more than they could chew in the pre-crisis, credit-crunch world. Now, several years on, PE-funded companies have managed to survive, mutate and thrive, according to a new report.
If only the marketplace for alpha fit neatly into a model from an Economics textbook.
Much to the chagrin of activist hedge fund managers, poison pills are making a comeback - in new and more lethal forms. For managers in particular, reading the label and following the directions is more important than ever.
Predictable patterns are easy game for hedge funds.
Everyone is talking about how institutional investors are beating up hedge fund managers on fees these days. But it seems the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. In fact, dropping fees may be the worst thing a hedge fund can do after a rough patch.
The arbiters of quality investment reporting have released a new set of draft guidelines of hedge fund managers. Most of it is simply a restatement of existing guidelines, but some is designed specifically for hedge funds.
It's getting easier to lead an institutional manager to illiquid strategies - not water - according to a recent survey by eVestment Alliance and Casey Quirk. But after what happened in 2008, why would they drink?
Fiduciaries think of a client's needs before their own - sacrificing the latter if required. But does the requirement for a hedge fund manager to put their client's interests before their own help or hinder the search for alpha? It depends on who you ask.
A new academic paper suggests managers open and close their funds to new investments to keep performance up - and to keep fees flowing in. We wonder whether hedge fund champion John Paulson would agree.
A funny thing happened on the way to blaming hedge funds for the global financial crisis, formulating a new set of rules to monitor them, politically compromising and scaling back on those rules and then slamming them through.
Despite talk of a "new normal", a closely-followed annual review of US endowment investing reveals that we're finally moving back to the "old" normal.
