The new normal, on Thambiah’s and Foscari’s account, includes an enhanced role by central banks, implementing monetary policies through open market operations, closer interconnections of banking institutions worldwide, much painful deleveraging, and persistently high levels of unemployment.

By John Brynjolfsson, Armored Wolf The Armored Wolf investment team held its Secular Forum in late March. This is an annual opportunity to step back and discuss major themes in the upcoming investment environment. This was an effort to identify the dominant underlying forces likely to drive asset prices . Thorough discussion and analysis led us to [...]

In a new paper, Andrew Lo has educed from his Adaptive Markets Hypothesis five practical conclusions, among them that during times of crisis, the usual positive relationship between risk and return may not hold. There is in general a "time-varying and often negative relationship between the two."

In January, the European Securities and Markets Authority set out in a consultation paper its guidelines on exchange traded funds and other issues relating to the Undertaking for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities, and it asked for comments by March 30. Much of the ESMA paper involves issues of tracking and disclosure.

From Lynne Feldman, Director of Marketing at the CAIA Association: David McMillan, CFA, Partner, Mercer Investment Consulting, discusses the role of consultants, risk management, trends in the hedge fund industry, and the need for education—now and in the future. Mr. McMillan spoke with Wendy L. Coleman, CAIA, CFA, FRM, in New York, NY. The series will continue [...]

Israel is now second only to the United States in terms of venture capital funds, with the highest rate of start-up businesses per capita and also the highest ratio of university degrees to population anywhere in the world.

Chief Judge Dennis Jacons said that the statutory language refers on the one hand to products that have “already been introduced into [placed in] the stream of commerce” and on the other hand to those that “are still being developed or readied” [produced for] such placement. The words evoke two distinct sets of products with a sequential relationship to one another, which satisfies well-established rules of statutory construction. The district court had upheld the indictment against challenge along these lines, because the district court had construed the language to include the production of anything whose purpose is “to facilitate or engage in such commerce.” The appeals court panel found error here.

PM's are used to assessing variables like changes in interest rates, unexpected business competition, disruptive technologies, and a host of known unknowns when making their portfolio decisions. An interview with Gernot Wagner reveals climate change as an already visible black swan, with an unimagined capacity for disruption..........and opportunity.

Although distressed“fire sales” are fewer in some periods than in others, it is true all around the business cycle that mutual fund managers face constraints related to the need “to cater to investors by investing in the hot stocks and by having a strong positive correlation between their flow and the value of the assets in which they invest,” as a new academic paper explains. Hedge funds, with their more professional investors, their deliberate opacity, and their constraints upon withdrawal, aren’t subject to those constraints. Thus, when mutual funds are constrained to follow a trend, hedge funds are in a position to be contrarians.

SWFs are distinct from pension funds at least in this sense, there are broadly speaking no explicit liabilities. There is no ongoing schedule of payments an SWF is responsible for making, for example. Nonetheless, there are clearly implicit liabilities. On this the point nearly all (92 percent) of survey respondents concurred, saying that implicit liabilities, arising from the objectives of the fund, must be taken into account in managers’ plans.

Diane Harrison examines the state of the hedge fund industry and regulation.

AllAboutAlpha discusses alpha, risk and constraints with Axioma CEO Dr. Sebastián Ceria.

It looks like the pension funds are worse off than if they had stuck to vanilla bonds and stocks, not least because of the management fees they pay to alternative investment managers.

The relationship between two markets that O’Kane posits might almost be taken as a paradigm of the difference between Granger causation and physical causation. Consider the case of two distinct radar systems, one better at long range detection than the other. The superior radar system will detect an incoming airplane before the inferior system will. Thus, there will be a relationship of Granger causation between the detection of a particular blip on the better system and its detection on the other system. If we see an incoming blip on the better system we will be able to predict that it will soon show up on the inferior system. It doesn’t follow, though, that the one radar is physically causing anything to happen to the other radar.

Mark O'Hare, Founder & CEO, Preqin, discusses the future of alternative investments and their role in institutional portfolios, private equity, data transparency, and the need for education in the alternative investment industry.