Guest columnist Charles Hage looks at hedge fund risk and discusses the long and the short of it.

If the actual results of the Korea Composite Stock Price Institute fitted a normal distribution (a "Bell curve,") then the index would record a daily loss larger than 3 percent only once every 1,219 years. In fact, it records such a loss once every 2.3 years. To fit the extraordinary real-world volatility of KOSPI and many other Asian markets, institutional investors especially should consider structured equity products that explicitly target a level of volatility.

At present, 21 percent of the world’s wealth belongs in the developed economies, but by 2020 that figure will have risen to 30 percent, according to a new report.

Distressed debt strategies have long been bedeviled by the shifting and thus unpredictable nature of the law of avoidance, or fraudulent conveyance, in the U.S. Perhaps it is, as some have said, because the law was written for a simpler time, and an industrial rather than a post-industrial country.

Our holiday bug in your ear is an encouragement to practice the Golden Rule in the year to come.

On Oct. 30, a Sunday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission received a draft report from MF Global that for the first time showed a shortfall in the segregated funds, a deficit of $900 million. At this time, both MF Global and the CFTC were referring to this in anodyne terms as an “accounting error.”

Bandon Capital's managing directors believe it is possible to generate alpha from unique non-market sources, and that they do so through their forecasts of domestic and overseas sovereign interest rates.

A recent meeting of an advisory group of the CFTC discussed the proper definition for high frequency trading, on the premise that only once a definition is in place can there be focused monitoring of the consequences of HFT.

Root Capital since inception have provided $330 million in credit to 349 small and growing businesses in 30 countries, maintaining a 99% repayment rate from our borrowers and a 100% repayment rate to our investors. This year alone, they have supplied $120 million in credit to 250 businesses which represent (or aggregate) 220,000 small-scale producers. That investment will (at a conservative estimate) benefit the lives of over 1.1 million people.

Fear has gripped investors since the crises of 2008 and 2009 and the pain keeps coming back with a resounding smack every time a news story breaks. However, investors are starting to move back into the markets and if emerging managers aren't in the game now, they aren't going to get to play.

We report on a talk given by Dr. Keith Crane of the Rand Organization about renewable energy and climate change at a meeting of the FInancial Policy Council. Dr. Crane showed that the cost differences between renewables and coal shrink when the costs of carbon emission controls are also counted. Subsequent research revealed possible reasons why the average person in the United States has a unique inability to accept climate science, in opposition to the conclusions of the U. S. Defense Department.

Financial crises always turn up new risks – and new opportunities. Famously, George Soros bet against the Bank of England during a fiscally challenged time in the early 1990s and pocketed a billion and change for his troubles. Was that a spectacular guess in a geopolitical game of chicken, or was it true alpha? We don't know, because we don't have the data. Currencies didn't much matter then; they do now.

The European Debt crisis has been the epicenter of the most recent market earthquakes. Now that a resolution is on the table, the "What now?" question remains.

The Commodity Customer Coalition has now issued a white paper presenting its own view of the “background, impacts, and solutions to MF Global’s Demise.”

We near the third anniversary of the day (December 10, 2008) when the two sons of Bernard Lawrence Madoff informed authorities that their father had just admitted to them that his asset management operation was “one big lie.” One of those sons, Mark Madoff, killed himself one year and one day later. The dimensions of [...]