"Over the next decade, impact investment will constitute an investment opportunity of between US$400 billion and US$1 trillion, generating profits of between US$183 billion and US$667 billion..."

"This industry will perhaps never really shake off the aura of secrecy and inevitable rumor mill, but investors and risk managers need to really start to judge funds on the metric against which the funds judge themselves: performance."

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.

AllAboutAlpha catches up with Lauren Templeton, great niece of Sir John Templeton to discuss value investing and its alpha potential.

"We're seeing a cycle where China is now a leader, and experiences the biggest rates of marginal growth in the world. That is already a game-changer which has had a disproportionate impact on emerging markets than developed ones."--Louis-Vincent Gave

In September 2011 the IMF estimated that roughly half of the Euro Zone's $9 trillion in outstanding government debt was now at 'heightened credit risk'. This is a crisis which billionaire investor George Soros has described as, "...a more dangerous situation now than in 2008.

James Rickards is a global expert on financial markets and global security. In this exclusive interview, he discusses some of the massive threats our financial markets face (internally and externally) and explains why he thinks "….all the tools in modern finance are basically false science. "

"...If all the money that's ever been invested in hedge funds had been put in treasury bills instead, the results would have been twice as good..." This is the astonishing finding of Simon Lack in his book "The Hedge Fund Mirage".

The fortunes of the world’s ultra high net worth (UHNW) individuals have surpassed $25 trillion. This is an astonishing figure, made even more so when contextualized against the value of the entire world's economic output (GDP) which, in 2010, was 'just' $63 trillion.

Google, Apple, eBay and Amazon have a combined market capitalization of almost double the top five world retailers combined. We investigate the alpha opportunities with these dot-com giants.

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.

"...by following and understanding the latest thinking in managing sovereign credit risk- portfolio and risk managers will not only be able to extract greater returns from their existing investments, but deliver greater protection for clients......"

Even against the backdrop of a global recession, the top 50 fastest growing companies in the USA averaged growth rates between 3,893% and 40,882% in the three years to the start of 2011.  These are rates of return which more than compensate the investor for the risk of making high-growth-young-company-investments.  For some investors, alternative markets [...]

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 concept underpinning financial exchanges can be traced back through much of human history. In Aristotle's Politics, "...there is the anecdote of Thales and his financial device.... he knew by his skill in the stars while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having little capital, he gave earnest-money for the use of all the olive-press in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no one bid against him. When the harvest-time came, and many wanted them all at once and of a sudden, he let them out at any rate which he pleased, and made a quantity of money..." While technology has moved on, the basic principle of futures and options exchanges remains the same. Participants in the market can take the role of Thales (using their insight to bet on price increases), the olive-press-owners (who hedged that Thales' price for the future was higher than they would otherwise get) or even investors who provide 'earnest money' to Thales (assuming markets will rise) or fund the olive-presses (assuming prices will fall).

Building with BRICs, an interview with Jim O'Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management

AllAboutAlpha.com interviewed Arzhang Kamarei, a partner at Tradeworx, a quantitative investment management firm with expertise in high-frequency and medium-frequency equity market-neutral strategies.

In any economic system, the fixed-income market plays an essential role as one of the principal ways of financing enterprise (be it corporate or sovereign).  Research shows that at the end of 2010, the global bond market had amounts outstanding of over US$95 trillion (to put that in context, the World Bank reported the total [...]

Professor Neil Johnson talks about the DNA of financial markets with AllAboutAlpha's Vikas Shah

This is the first of a new series called "Alpha Hunters." The nimble qualities of alternative investments is part of what makes them essential to every investor's portfolio. They can move quickly to take advantage of market inefficiencies and go where other more traditional investment vehicles cannot. It is in the spirit of seeking the ever-moving alpha that we introduce this series, reaching out to experts in different strategies to see where they are finding alpha. We hope you find this series illuminating and please feel free to send suggestions for Alpha Hunters you'd like to read about. Kristin Fox Managing Editor

Vikas Shah discusses the "left tail" with Mark Spitznagel, founder and CIO of Universa Investments.