By Christopher Faille The ideas of “cause and effect” seem simple enough when left unexamined. The cue stick hits the cue ball; the cue ball hits the eight ball; the eight ball rolls into the pocket. How can anyone fail to understand this?

There is an old story often attributed to economist Burton Malkiel. A professor of finance and an undergraduate are walking together. They see what looks like a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. The naïve student bends down to pick it up, but the professor says, “Don’t bother. If it were a real bill, it [...]

Commodities have been the big story of the past decade – almost a repeat of the inflation-burdened 1970s. If hems reflect stock market sentiment, we should be seeing an outbreak of bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes. Certainly, a new cohort of investors, institutional and retail alike, see price rises in the elements core inflation strips out – namely food and energy – as a secular shift. Still, appearances can be deceiving. A recent study argues a long-only bet on commodities is likely to result in a return that is statistically 0: not the 1970s at all.

Cyril Demaria, a partner at Tiaré Investment Management in Zurich, and a former portfolio manager at Maaf Gestion, has written a book, Introduction to Private Equity, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Hoboken, N.J., 2010, 244 pp., $49.95. The subject matter is named well enough in the title. I’ll only add that Demaria uses the term “private [...]

Well, maybe not $75 Trillion.  And it doesn’t call itself a hedge fund.  To be really, really fair, Bank of America couldn’t have gotten all its derivatives positions wrong, even though it’s a bank.  However, as we shall demonstrate, the phrase “equity sliver” is way too optimistic.  Understand this about a derivative hedge:  it’s a [...]

By Christopher Faille Charles Jones of Columbia Business School made a presentation at an SIFR event in Stockholm, titled “What do we know about algorithmic and high-frequency trading?” Although a distinguished professor like Jones would not put the matter this way, his thoughts do have me thinking of the old human-inhabited trading floors, and their cyberspace [...]

This is the first in a series of real estate articles by new editorial board member Jan B. Brzeski, Principal at Arixa Capital Advisors, LLC, Los Angeles, CA.

Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001 on the subject of cognitive models of human hypertext navigation.

The explosion of the subprime market may yet produce a significant change in the way investors and their managers with a distressed-assets strategy maneuver for advantage in the context of Chapter 11 proceedings

The latest version of a yearly analysis tells the same old story about performance, now backed up by fifteen years of data. And the potential rewards of investing with smaller funds go beyond what you see in the database statistics.

Jeremy King of Knight Pacific discusses his contrarian views on investing in Asia.

By Christopher Faille One of the great clichés used by reporters, commenters, bloggers and twitterers in recent months has been that the central bankers of the developed world, and/or their Treasuries, have “run out of bullets.” They have “spent all their ammunition” seeking stimulus already and will have nothing in reserve should there be another serious [...]

Alpha Hunters Andrew Timpson and Joseph Schlater of Busara Advisors talk about what it takes to get an emerging manager allocation.

By Christopher Faille A new report on hedge fund inflows indicates that the rate at which money is coming into the hedge fund industry reflects that industry’s improved performance, but that if these figures are segmented by strategy or geography, the different rates at which they are attracting money do not very accurately reflect their different [...]

Diversification – particularly of risk – is the “a” in alpha. At first sight, commodities earn an “a.” Certainly they have attracted attention from institutional and retail investors alike. Most of those are long-only portfolios – as in “l.” They are a “p” for poor, “h” as in hedge in “a” for adverse markets.