Should a lender of last resort lower interest rates to near zero in the hope that liquidity will drown systemic sorrows? Bagehot argues for a contrary approach. The interest rates for loans made to desperate borrowers should be high. “This will operate as a heavy fine on unreasonable timidity, and will prevent the greatest number of applications by persons who do not require it. The rate should be raised early in the panic, so that the fine may be paid early…."

The phrase “hybrid pension system,” as you might expect, refers to systems that can be categorized neither as defined contribution nor as defined benefit simply. This may involve for example risk sharing amongst employees, within or between generations of recipients, in the context of a collective defined contribution (CDC). The essential argument of this study, by Samuel Sender, Applied Research Manager at EDHEC, is that demographics will push both DC and DB plans to hybridize.

Quite aside from the neat through-the-planet short-cuts they might allow: how fast is a neutrino? This turns out to be a very controversial matter. Last year, scientists working at CERN set off weeks of feverish speculation with reports indicating that neutrinos travel faster than light. If I understand this at all, it would mean if true that a New York or London trader could in theory accept a Tokyo trader’s offer before the offer had actually been made. Now that would be the ultimate in HFT: negative latency.

The issue of restitution for loss has been very much on the midns of the asset management industry over the last four years. As EDHEC observes in its new report on non-financial risks, “The collapse of Lehman not only [showed] the world that a systemically large institution could fail; it put … the question of international cooperation and rules harmonisation on centre stage. Restitution may be rendered impossible, at least under reasonable delays, in extreme cases such as the default of an institution – reputable as it might have been.”

Awkward and unexpected results from insolvency are among the legal risks to which inadequate financial market infrastructures (FMIs) can lead. There are also credit risks, liquidity risks, and in a future time of crisis or stress: contagion.

The Goldstein case has arisen because Massachusetts prohibits an issuer of unregistered securities sold only to sophisticated investors from running a website accessible to not-so-sophisticated folks, or from contacting them with emails in response to interest expressed on the website. The trial court upheld the law and regulation at issue against Bulldog’s first amendment arguments, finding that the scheme was justified because it was narrowly tailored to the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the capital markets. The state's Supreme Judicial Court agreed, offering a somewhat surprising and indirect explanation. It is the SJC decision that Bulldog wants the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn.

Any quantitative strategy is susceptible to being reduced to an index, and along with this, to transparency and routine. Once this happens, that "alpha" becomes "beta," and the 2 + 20 fees are no longer available. A manager in search of alpha will have to move beyond that strategy, peeling away that layer of the onion and going to a deeper, not-yet-indexable, strategy.

What was clear after even Level 1 adoption last year was that the AIFMD would require managers to disclose a good deal more to their home market authorities than has been their wont; that leverage shall be closely monitored once it is deemed to have been employed “on a substantial basis at the level of the AIF,” and leverage may well be limited outright; further, it was clear that depositary institutions will be saddled with new liabilities. These bullet points might be implemented with various degrees of rigidity, and that is the continuing subject of debate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Traditionally, the endowment model has involved holding illiquid assets, and benefitting from the premiums that markets pay institutions with a tolerance for illiquidity. Further, this self-image of endowments as buy-and-hold institutions leads to a de-emphasis of risk management, in the expectation that near term zigs and zags will level out nicely if given enough time. Mark Schmid and Que Nguyen, both of the University of Chicago, break with this model in a recent paper. They say, “While we continue to pursue strong returns, we must do so without taking on excessive risk to the University."

Cinnober has sold a customized form of its Scila Surveillance software -- a product designed to detect abnormal market behavior -- to the Qatar Exchange. One of the purposes of Scila Surveillance is the detection of harmful variants of algorithmic trading, such as the trading "snipers" who drive off market makers and reduce liquidity.

According to its advocates, trend following as a strategy works from the premise that price trends represent a process of consensus building. As a new idea takes hold, "the earliest adopters of this idea place their trades in accordance with it" and they get to watch in satisfaction as "a growing mass of market participants adopts the same thesis. Early adopters can surf the wave to the beach.

Consider the sort of information that was coming out of the Supreme Court building in Washington as oral arguments over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) proceeded last week. A lawyer, arguing that the recently enacted health care bill is constitutional under familiar commerce-clause precedents, found himself on the receiving end of rather aggressive questions from a certain Justice. Suppose, then, that you have a substantial investment in a health insurance company, or in a pharmaceutical concern, or in any of the many industries that may be affected directly or indirectly by such a decision. Should this new datum matter to you? And, if so, how do you figure out how much it should matter?

Consultants expect that managers' need to generate steady income in a low interest rate environment will drive a lot of portfolio turnover in 2012, inclusive of the movement of alternatives into core positions within portfolios, and it will drive one-time U.S. focused investors and managers to look abroad. Meanwhile, pensions are retreating toward passive mandates.

The authors of a new book from the Milken Institute contend that one factor working against the recovery of the housing market in the U.S. is that the residential finance system is almost entirely a ward of the federal government, "a situation that cannot be indefinitely sustained without seriously damaging monetary stability and the prospects for a return to long-term growth," they write. It is imperative, these authors believe, that the United States get its private investors involved again in the financing of housing.

Britain’s Private Finance Initiative has continued through the administrations since Blair’s, and indeed has inspired emulation across the Channel. At the same time, it has stirred up a good deal of criticism, and in November 2011 the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a plan to reform the PFI. One of the reform proposals is to seek broader participation by pension funds, or in pale bureaucratic jargon, “access a wider range of financing sources.”

The top four risks facing pension fund sponsors, in the order of importance assigned to them by those sponsors, are: underfunding of liabilities; asset & liability mismatch; asset allocation; meeting return goals. These are the same four goals that were top rated last year. “The year-over-year consistency in the top four risk factors … is not entirely surprising” the study authors say. The consultancy and actuarial firm Milliman lowered the average discount rate from 4.53 percent in November to 4.25 percent in December 2011.

The parent corporation, Dynegy Inc. (NYSE: DYN) did not file for bankruptcy. As of August 31 of last year, Dynegy's only asset was the equity in Dynegy Holdings, which in turn owned various operating subsidiaries. But on September 1, Dynegy Holdings transferred its coal power facilities to Dynegy. Two months later Dynegy Holdings and related entities filed.

Reliance on optimization tools that in turn rely on standard “user risk factors” will make factor alignment worse, caution three executives of Axioma. An optimizer will cherry pick “the aspects of the model of expected returns that it deems desirable when gauged on the yardstick of marginal contribution to systemic risk.” This amounts to making, and betting on, the erroneous assumption that a lack of correlation with the used risk factors is a lack of systemic risk altogether.

The Grant Thornton paper maintains that the asset management industry achieved "performance and operational efficiencies" during 2011, and this sounds like the sort of marginal adaptation that play a large part in Charles Darwins' writings, to which GT's Winstoin Wilson alluded. But ... the report also treats the regulatory environment as a meteor, capable of wiping out even the best-adapted of pre-collision dinosaurs. So "the Darwinian process" is an odd label for what it describes.

Funds of funds dominate the world of institutional investors in Day 1 or early stage (D1/ES) hedge funds, and they do so for a simple reason. That is their business model. They exist to invest in hedge funds, and their goal is to be fully invested at all times, not to have a lot of money sitting around as cash.

Three lawyers with Covington & Burlington write about the new intensified scrutiny to which regulators are subjecting algorihtmic and high frequency trading. They place it in the context of an old dispute over what constitutes market manipulation. According to the broadest view, if a trader's 'sole intent' in making even a quite ordinary buy or sell order is to move the price, then the resulting trade is market manipulation.

With the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act (more formally the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) in 2010, Congress demanded change. It did not specifically demand changes in the rules relating to CPOs, but it did demand that the SEC change certain rules regarding hedge fund advisors, and the CFTC has decided that a reconsideration of the CPO rules is “consistent with the tenor of the provisions” of that act because the “sources of risk delineated in the Dodd-Frank Act with respect to private funds are also presented by commodity pools.”

The question in 2012 is not whether hedge funds (and other alternative investment vehicles) can attract pension funds, but how they should go about it. Alternatives managers will benefit most from the heightened interest of pension funds if they address the continuing concerns of their pension fund colleagues. For example, pension fund managers are well aware that investment in exotic and illiquid products is something hedge funds do, and they know that these products can help make a quick exit impossible.

After a survey of recipients of the UCITS Alternative Index, the UAI Industry Survey Q1 2012, Alix Capital reports that majorities expressed satisfaction with the current level of allocation for certain strategies: commodities, emerging markets, forex, and macro global strategies. But there was a lot of interest in increasing allocations to CTAs, equity market neutral, and volatility-based strategies. The strategy that receives the largest negative response (largest intended reduction in portfolio allocation) is fixed income.

One crucial takeaway from SEI's latest is that "the quality of operations is a major consideration in institutions' screening and evaluation of hedge funds." Eighty percent of respondents agreed with the observation that "operational strength is a hallmark of an institutional-quality hedge fund." One quarter of those say they agree "strongly." Only three percent disagree.

Some managers of HFT or algorithmic funds must have felt some relief upon the arrest of Sergey Aleynikov in July 2009, his conviction in December 2010, or his imprisonment the following March. Programmers in the financial world were put on notice that criminal prosecution was among the possible consequences were they to treat their knowledge of their employer's edge as a marketable commodity. Thus, the news on Friday [February 17, 2012] that Aleynikov is now a free man came as something of a jolt.

Comparing the different editions of the Axioma Quarterly Risk Review for 4th Quarter 2011 leaves some fascinating insights. For example, it is becoming more difficult over time, in much of the world, for investors to create significant diversification within the (domestic) equity portion of their portfolio, because the correlations of stock pairs have been increasing.

Because of the furor over ABACUS and analogous transactions, the legislative mandate of the Volcker rule came to include a section 619, telling the SEC to ban underwriters or sponsors of asset-backed securities from engaging “in any transaction that would involve or result in any material conflict of interest with respect to any investor in a transaction arising out of such activity.” On Monday, February 13, the final day for comment on the proposed rule, some of the more fascinating comments spoke to this issue.

The Global Association of Risk Professionals has surveyed risk managers, analysts and academics to get a sense of the implications of the demise of MF Global Holdings for the role of risk managers. Its findings add to a growing sense that the firm’s last chief executive, Jon Corzine, a former New Jersey Governor and U.S. Senator, was an edge-dwelling trader at heart, eager (as Dealbook put it in an analysis in December) to play a “hands-on role in the firm’s high-stakes risk-taking;” indeed, a man enmeshed in a “romance with risk.”

Data on the endowments of institutions of higher learning shows a significant spread between the performance of the largest endowments and the lagging performance of the smaller. The return that endowments received on their use of alternative strategies, too, depends in part upon the size of the endowment doing the investing. Endowments under $25 million in assets under management made only 9.5 percent on this asset class in FY 2011, while those with more than $1 billion in AUM made a 16.9 percent return hunting in the same jungles.

Infrastructure is a perpetual investment, whether it's rebuilding old, existing underpinnings in developed markets or building the foundations that turn an emerging nation into a developing one. Preqin looks at this lesser known investment that underpins many alternative portfolios.

Emerging OTC derivatives in the emerging markets of Latin America and Asia are just one more sign that these countries are growing up.

"Farhaz Miah, of Preqin, sets out the numbers for private real estate fundraising in 2011, showing that the market continues to suffer from the impact of the 2008 crisis. He notes, also, that debt strategies have become increasingly popular, both in specifically debt-strategy funds and in opportunistic funds that employ debt strategies as part of a broader structure."

AAA sat down with Alex Gurvich and Jim Mitchell, both of The Rockledge Group, an investment advisory firm headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. We began by discussing the mid-January launch of a new product that gives the long-short equity strategy an ETF format, and ended up talking about a good deal else, such as the inherent superiority of ETFs over mutual funds, and Pimco's recent recognition of that fact.

Since transaction costs and the illiquidity of certain portions of an index make ideal tracking impossible, there will be a difference between the return of a tracking ETF, such as those tracking ETFs that are structured as UCITS in Europe, and the return of the underlying index or benchmark. The European Securities and Markets Authority maintains that investors should be informed of the factors that are likely to affect the size and the volatility of this difference.

Alpha Hunter Khiem Do talks about Asia and where the alpha is from his perspective.

The Hartford (CT) CFA Society recently hosted a workshop on “Pension Risk Management and Governance.” The discussion proved to be mostly, though not exclusively, about ERISA and about how plan sponsors may arm themselves against the sorts of litigation it may inspire. Moderator Martin Rosenburgh, who is both an attorney and a financial analyst, and currently [...]

Two scholars affiliated with the Center for European Economic Research, drawing upon European data between 2000 and 2008, maintain that PE backed companies do not suffer from higher bankruptcy rates than their control group of comparable companies. Their paper also addresses the relationship between bankruptcy risk on the one hand and the syndicated (or, conversely, the stand-alone) nature of a PE deal. It finds no significant relationship.

The SEI asked institutional investors in hedge funds what was the number one reason for their inclusion of such funds in their portfolio. The most popular single choice was "absolute return." On the other hand, if you combine the numbers of the distinct answers that involve limiting the downside, then the percentage of respondents who gave some risk-management focused answer is 56 percent. As SEI says, this is "a marked cultural shift from the early days of hedge funds, when many investors focused on their potential to produce outsided returns."

In Singapore, some of the synthetic ETFs involve considerably more exposure to uncollateralized counterparty risk than the 10 percent or less that UCITS would allow. Singapore has, for example, the iShares MSCI India tracker, which has a 20 to 25 percent exposure. But Celent sees a possibiliuty that laxity will prove a winning move vis-a-vis Hong Kong.

AIMA, in a report sharply critical of the proposed European Union financial transaction tax, sets out the way in which the tax could burden businesses, and their consumers, to a degree far greater than the proponents contend. After all, any single product may pass through several stages between raw materials and final consumer, as there are several steps between farmer harvesting wheat and retail outlet, such as Tesco, selling pasta. Businesses at every stop along the way (farmers, wheat processers, pasta extruders) will naturally want to hedge their own operational risks in the financial markets, so the price of the finished product will reflect the repeated imposition of the FTT.

First, an investor (according to a new white paper on due diligence from Merlin Securities) must decide what kind of strategy it is to which he wants exposure, and generate a list of managers who practice that strategy. Thereafter he can focus on each firm on that list looking at each of the three (qualitative) components of management, and subjecting his impressions to a variety of (quantitative) tests. Tripartite divisions seem to come into play a lot.