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Browse by CategoryHome » Category List » Hedge Fund Industry
Research says funds of funds not just “multi-manager funds with extra fees”13 May 2008
There are some in the hedge fund industry that look at the fees charged by funds of hedge funds as the equivalent to Puddy’s “optional overcharge“. However, a new study by one fund of funds supplier aims to dispel this notion once and for all. (Says Puddy: “Yeah. That’s right.”) As hedge funds began to ride a wave of interest around the turn of the century, there seemed to emerge a general consensus among those new to the asset class that funds of funds were the most appropriate way to invest. The argument made a lot of intuitive sense as the idiosyncratic risk posed by hedge funds could be ameliorated through diversification. And so the fund of funds became a dominant species in Hedgistan. But as we reported last week, there now seems to be a subtle shift back to single-strategy hedge funds. In fact, discussion about the potential weaknesses of funds of funds (fees, illiquidity of underlying funds and a lack of transparency into the underlying funds etc.) began a few years ago with the rise of the multi-strategy fund. Multi-strategy funds argued that, like funds of funds, they too were diversified. But, they said, they had lower aggregate fees and could dynamically allocate between strategies at the drop of a hat. In addition, they argued that since they were familiar with the underlying holdings in each strategy, they could manage risk in a more holistic manner. And so it was that multi-strategy funds seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Until a few months ago… The Winter 2007 Journal of Alternative Investments included a paper by Giresh Reddy, Peter Brady and Kartik Patel - all of New Jersey-based Prisma Capital called “Are Funds of Funds Really Multi-manager Funds with Extra Fees?” The paper (available here at Prisma’s website) makes a cogent argument in favour of the much maligned funds of funds. In other words the answer, according to the authors, is “No, funds of funds are more than just multi-manager funds with extra fees”. They point to the fact that the performance divergence between hedge fund managers is larger than the performance divergence between different hedge fund strategies (in contrast to what is encountered in traditional long-only investment classes). They observe:
They go on to compare the effects of re-allocating each month from a) the worst manager to best manager (a process at which funds of funds excel) and b) worst strategy to best strategy (a process at which multi-strategy funds excel). According to their model, shifting strategies each month yields very little additional return - as illustrated in the following chart from the paper:
But when money is re-allocated between the worst and best managers in the universe (something the authors posit a fund of funds is more qualified to do), then the picture changes…
The trio makes a number of other arguments in favour of funds of funds, including:
On the sticky issue of fees, the authors contend that multi-strategy funds do charge more than single manager funds - albeit not a ”second layer” like a fund of funds. But what about the fact that some managers in a fund of funds could earn a performance fee even though the overall fund may be down on the year? (see related posting on this phenomenon.) After all, isn’t it far better to calculate performance fees once, not across many funds? The authors run some numbers to show the total affect of this phenomenon amounts to only 16 bps per annum in additional costs (or only around 10bps when you factor in high water marks). While some may consider funds of funds to be like expensive training wheels for hedge fund newbies, there may be method the madness after all according to this paper. And so it seems that the death of funds of funds may have been overstated. Perhaps there is still hope for this modest, trillion-dollar industry. As Puddy would say, “High five!”
Comments »HF and PE managers square off on implications of credit squeeze9 May 2008
Samper was a member of a panel discussing the different views taken by hedge funds and private equity funds on the recent credit crisis. Catherine Lewis, a partner with London-based private equity firm Parish Capital, said there was now a significant alpha-generation potential for small private equity funds that focus on niche sectors. In this segment, she said, transactions are less likely to be over-leveraged and are therefore more likely to flourish in the current credit environment. Lewis said that the illiquidity crisis facing credit markets was leading to a marked slowdown in new investment activity, a return to more conservative deal structures, postponed exits and smaller IRRs.
Comments »Report says hedge funds, portable alpha and 130/30 all leading to (financial) climate change5 May 2008
Although the 130/30 market has grown since then, it remains in the very low hundreds of billions globally. Yet in a report released a few days ago, the Security Traders Association (STA) blames recent market volatility, in part, on 130/30 funds. Says the report:
High velocity hedge funds seem to be primary focus of the STAs concern. But 130/30 isn’t the only institutional investment strategy at which the STA points a finger. The use of derivatives (for example, for portable alpha) is also identified as a growing source of market volatility by the report:
Comments »Does shift away from funds of funds mean diversification is dead?4 May 2008
Now it appears they weren’t kidding. Bloomberg cites Pensions & Investments data that shows the proportion of US pension assets invested in funds of funds fell from 57% to 49% over the 2002-2007 time period. Meanwhile, Euopean funds of funds seem to be doing just fine - this according to Global Pensions. The magazine reported back in March that:
Comments »Small US hedge funds fail to reach orbit, fall back to Earth.30 April 2008
Apparently, large hedge funds - the kind that get all the media attention when they perform poorly or have to suspend redemptions - are actually shutting down less frequently than the average fund. HFN reports that teeny-weeny funds with less than US$15 million of assets had an attrition rate in Q1 that was more than twice as high as their proportion of all funds in the HFN database. Tough times for the small fry? Possibly. But HFN doesn’t say whether this level of turnover is actually out of the ordinary. Assets of $15 million translate into $300,000 in management fees - barely enough to keep one or two people and a small office afloat. So, as with small restaurants, high attrition may simply be par for the course. Does this portend doom for the industry? Probably note. It simply shows that it’s getting harder and harder to reach the “critical velocity” required to put a new hedge fund into orbit. It’s as much an asset raising issue as it is an investment performance issue (although the two are obviously related). Starting a hedge fund is often viewed as a route to easy riches. However, many start-up managers soon realize they’d rather make more and work less back at the prop desk.
Comments »Is high hedge fund compensation really that new?17 April 2008
But even this staid reverence has its limits. Yesterday’s release of Alpha Magazine’s top-earning hedge fund managers has – at least for this week – reignited the debate over what is fair and equitable in US society. The result has been a sort of mixture of two familiar issues: CEO compensation and the get rich quick phenomenon of the (pre-implosion) tech bubble John Paulson was #1 on Alpha’s list with 2007 earnings of $3.7 billion. Nine other hedge fund managers made over $500 million. Not surprisingly, the media is now replete with stories about how “crumbling home prices and $100 oil helped Wall Street’s Highest Earners pull in $19 billion last year”, and there is growing outrage over the quantum of these numbers. Paulson’s net worth rose by $3.7 billion last year. Yet he wouldn’t have even have made the top 10 on Forbes annual list of the largest year-over-year increases in wealth. According to the most recent Forbes 400 list (October 2007), Bill Gates and Warren Buffet each made $6 billion while Michael Bloomberg made $6.2 billion. Relative no-names like David Koch and Sheldon Adelson made $5 billion and $7.5 billion respectively.
Comments »Hedge fund survey reveals managers either a) fulfilling mandate, or b) dreaming in Technicolor (check one)16 April 2008
The accounting firm Rothstein Kass found that 90% of senior partners thought hedge funds would pull in more assets this year and three quarters felt that there would be more fund launches this year than last year. Pulling off this feat would require brand and marketing expertise according to 90% of respondents. Apparently Rothstein Kass’ mailing list includes a lot of optimistic managers. Last September, when the firm last polled this group, 50% of hedge funds felt that the (then recent) credit crisis was “positive” for their hedge fund. Less than 20% felt the credit crisis was going to have a negative impact (see posting).
Comments »European institutions apparently staying the course on hedge funds16 April 2008US hedge fund managers aren’t the only ones bullish on their sector. Mercer recently released the results of a survey of European institutional investors that concluded hedge funds were “targeted for increased exposure” by European institutions.
And State Street Global Advisors reiterated its bullish position on the hedge fund industry in this Thomson Investment News article. Reports Thomson:
Comments »Mallaby shows hedge funds that the best defense is a good offence14 April 2008
You may remember the name Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations. In December 2006 he wrote an excellent article for the journal Foreign Affairs (see related posting) in which he made the following observation:
Since then, Mallaby hasn’t lost any of his sense of irony with regard to the way society and the media view hedge funds. In a January 28, 2008 op-ed for the Washington Post, Mallaby contrasts hedge funds with investment banks, writing:
Comments »Weekly Newsreel10 April 2008
“Tough Times for Hedge Funds”: Reuters provides another prime example. Says this promotional story for its hedge fund summit this week: “Many investors expect the $1.8 trillion industry’s estimated 10,000 funds to be winnowed down by a few thousand in a few years. Funds that oversaw nearly $4 billion in assets have already closed their doors in the first quarter of 2008.” Only a couple of problems: A) The number of players in any new industry is always “winnowed down” as it matures and says nothing about the overall size of the industry and B) $4billion x 4 quarters = $16 billion = if true, the lowest attrition rate in 3 years… “First-quarter redemptions hit hedge fund industry”: While we’re on the topic, Dow Jones says “Hedge funds overall recorded losses in the first quarter, particularly in January and March. They lost 2.78% of their value in the quarter after dropping 2.46% last month, according to the investable global hedge fund index published by US data provider Hedge Fund Research.” While ugly compared to the positive returns people have come to expect from hedge funds, this pale in comparison to the S&P 500’s Q1 loss of over 7%.
Comments »AIMA comes out swinging8 April 2008
Earlier today, AIMA issued a press release that could very well double as a posting on AllAboutAlpha.com called “Hedge Fund Industry Target of Unreasonable Criticism”. It essentially draws attention to one of the central findings of the Greenwich Associates survey discussed above: that hedge funds and other alternative investments have now become mainstream. In additon, it questions mass media reporting of the industry and calls for “more balanced reporting going forward.” Those who might think we at AllAboutAlpha.com are a bunch of hedge fund apologists – look away now. Below we re-publish said press release in its entirety:
Comments »Hedge fund closure data: ebola or just a bleeding nose?6 April 2008
That same day MarketWatch published a story entitled “Hedge-fund hemorrhage: $60 billion liquidated in last three years, shrinking investor options.” Pa-leese, $60 billion in a $2 trillion+ industry over 3 years is a nosebleed and in no way suggests the industry is a hemophiliac. Says MarketWatch:
Comments »New Rydex “alternative strategies” fund shows why the term is so hard to define2 April 2008
Rydex’s response was to launch a fund of funds called the “Alternative Strategies Allocation Fund” that keeps things simple for investors by wrapping up various alternative investments into one vehicle. But don’t call it a fund of hedge funds because its total hedge fund content weights in at exactly zero percent. It’s actually a fund of: managed futures, commodities, currencies, real estate and tiny bit of, wait for it, hedge fund replication. As the firm points out in a press release announcing the launch of the strategy, retail investors have had a tough time participating in the alpha-centric investment revolution so far:
Naturally, we fully support efforts to allow average investors to hold uncorrelated, alpha-producing assets. But the complexity of this particular product provides an interesting insight into why investors are apparently so confused.
Comments »New Study: No hedge fund bubble…but a potentially serious capacity constraint30 March 2008
This is kind of ironic given that the industry seems to obsess over the “non-normality” of hedge fund returns. While fund and sub-strategy returns may be non-normal, there often seems to be an implicit assumption that alphas follow a bell curve. Thus, when hedge funds underperform, we assume that all hedge funds underperform - that the bell curve simply shifted to the left. But Zhaodong Zhong of Penn State University wondered if the averages hide a more complex explanation. His new study examines the performance of individual hedge funds to determine if average hedge fund alpha has fallen a) due to more unskilled managers (the “hedge fund bubble” hypothesis) or due to less superstars (the “capacity constraint” hypothesis). (Hat tip to blogger Paul Kedrosky for bringing this paper to our attention).
Comments »Study examines “mulligans” in hedge fund performance data17 March 2008
According to the US Golf Association:
There has been considerable debate over the years about whether hedge fund managers have been giving themselves mulligans when they occasionally shank their new funds into the drink. Since hedge fund managers voluntarily report their performance to the major databases (which form the foundation for most academic studies), it is felt that only their best funds eventually make it on the list - and when they do, the performance since inception is “back-filled” into the database to create what is often referred to as an “instant track record”. The result is that the returns reported by so-called “emerging managers” are not really a true representation of all attempts to launch new funds.
Comments »Alpha-centric Newsreel14 March 2008
Morgan Stanley says Alpha/Beta Separation “the way of the future”. The AllAboutAlpha site partner lays out its alpha-centric philosophy telling IPE that the pension industry is about to experience a “second wave” of LDI strategies based on the separation of alpha and beta. Dutch Insurer Aegon splits portfolio into alpha and beta segments are farms each one out to a different manager. According to the firm’s press release, “By managing the parts separately from one another, better risk-return ratios are possible. This way, more sources of value added will be available and a greater focus can be created in the portfolio. Separating the US share portfolio has created an increase of a yearly average of the total return of 2.5% without any risk increase.”
Comments »First Lady’s former pension plan now fuelled by alternative investments7 March 2008
Barron’s reports this week that Harris was brought on board in late ‘06 to revamp plan - particularly its adherence to the traditional “60/40″ equities/bonds split. Says Barron’s:
However, as Barron’s reports, critics echo some of the concerns expressed by their neighbors in New Mexico (see related posting):
Comments »What is “complexity” and is it really to blame?24 February 2008
For example, the Journal article argued that,
This is a fair hypothesis (and one that we have also made in the past). But the anecdotal examples held up as proof would likely be branded as “curve-fitting” by statisticians. One hedge fund cited in the article faced problems with its real estate holdings, one had “improper accounting”, and one “got burned dabbling in debt”. None of these drawdowns were blamed explicitly on excessive complexity. In fact, the only drawdown explicitly blamed on excessive complexity was actually run by a bank.
Comments »Land of Enchantment apparently disenchanted with hedge funds21 February 2008
However, the firm also says that institutions remain nervous about their hedge fund investments:
Politicians are - quite rightly - sensitive to “headline risk”. One such politician is New Mexico’s Teresa Zanetti. She tabled a bill in the state legislature at the end of January that would ban hedge fund investment by the $15 billion New Mexico State Investment Council (although, according to Pensions & Investments, it would have allowed the State pension plans to continue investing in hedge funds).
Comments »January turmoil has “sharpened the argument for the convergence of traditional and alternative asset management”: Report19 February 2008Putnam Lovell released its annual survey of asset management M&A this month. This 45 page document is packed with useful information and is a must-read if you follow the paradigm-shifting going on in this industry. Here are some highlights… When you were a kid, did you ever say you wouldn’t do something “for all the money in the world?” Well, we now you know exactly how much that is. According to the report, there was $68 trillion in major capital pools worldwide in 2006, and Putnam Lovell’s “most conservative forecast” shows this amount rising to almost $110 trillion by 2012.
The report shows that last year saw another leap in M&A transactions involving alternative asset managers. There were 76 transactions - up from 60 in 2006. However, alternative managers’ proportion of all asset management transactions remained stable at around one-third.
Comments »This week’s Economist successfully nails blancmange to the wall17 February 2008
This week’s Economist contains a great analysis of how commonly-held beliefs about hedge funds may be urban folklore. In fact, the piece makes so many succinct arguments, that we can’t really add much other than to suggest a few related AllAboutAlpha.com postings for anyone looking for additional perspective. “Trying to assess the behaviour of hedge funds is a bit like attempting to nail a blancmange to the wall. It is all too easy for the truth to slip away.” “…Take hedge-fund “failures”. Most funds close down because it does not pay their managers to continue, not because their performance has been disastrous. For every Bear Stearns ‘enhanced-leverage’ fund that loses all of its value, there are five or six funds that shut after a fall of a few percentage points…Doubtless more hedge funds will fail this year, but that will not necessarily be a sign of the industry’s demise.”
“…A survey by William Fung and Narayan Naik of the London Business School examined five different benchmarks and found that only 3% of constituents were common to all of them.”
Comments »Hedge fund seeding so “last month”?12 February 2008
As a result of such pressures, says the article, MFS Investment Management recently “killed its hedge fund seeding program”. However, we submit that the prospects for the hedge fund seeding model are based on two factors: investor demand and (start-up) manager supply. As we suggested in January, boom times for the hedge fund industry meant that start-up funds often felt they didn’t need to give up part of their equity to gain access to capital. As the capital spigots were turned down in 2007 many high quality start-ups probably had a good hard look at their prospects - balancing their marketing efforts against their need to focus on investing. As a result, many hold-outs are now likely reconsidering - making the lives of seeders just a little easier (example). Of course, the very pressures that would have made some hold-outs blink are also making life difficult for the seeding operations themselves, as the Wall Street Journal points out. The question, then, is how difficult an environment we’ll see for smaller managers. Too easy and the managers won’t want to give up anything; too hard and the seeder can’t raise funds for the whole enterprise to work. These competing forces are what we believe will make 2008 a year of change for the industry.
Comments »Top Institutional Hedge Funds4 February 2008Long gone are the days when hedge funds were for just for university foundations and rich guys. As this new ranking from Pensions & Investments shows, 72% of the assets of the largest 10 US hedge fund managers are institutional. None of the names will surprise you. But what’s interesting about the list is that it contains the proportion of institutional assets managed by each firm (all are north of 60%). The analysis accompanying the ranking is also worth a read. It describes what amounts to four archetypes of how an institutional hedge fund managers is created: high performance (e.g. Paulson), alpha/beta separation (e.g. Bridgewater), high net-worth (e.g. Citadel), and quant strategies (e.g. D.E. Shaw).
Comments »January 29, 2008: The day the tide turned for hedge funds?3 February 2008
After enduring a year of particularly pronounced “scape-goat-itude”, hedge funds have suddenly been replaced by banks as the villains de jour. In fairness, this transition probably began with the sub-prime crisis which although it tipped a few hedge funds into liquidation, had an even more profound impact on traditional investing. Knab refers to this piece in the FT which observed that:
Comments »From seeding to harvesting, 08 shaping up to be year of change for hedge fund industry16 January 2008
Last week, we covered the reverse takeover of Asset Alliance, a company that takes equity stakes in emerging hedge fund managers (see related posting). Soon afterwards, FRM, the $14b fund of hedge funds announced the launch of its own hedge fund seeding platform. FRM seems to be pitching this new fund as an alternative to buying hedge fund IPOs, which it tells the FT “generally aren’t great.” Clive Peggram, who heads up the initiative, tells Thomson News that the fund will close at about $1 billion and plans to allocate $50m-$100m chunks to hedge funds pursuing a fundamental strategy. While the focus of these funds is on early-stage start-ups, the increasing popularity of seeding operations (Man and MFS also have similar programmes) can be interpreted as a sign that the hedge fund industry is maturing. As the FT points out, raising capital ain’t what it used to be. As this piece in the Guardian last week shows, institutional investors want size and track record - and neither of these are strong suits for the start-ups. As a result, it’s getting easier to convince start-up hedge fund managers to part ways with some of their equity.
Comments »Warning to Accountants & Consultants: Prime brokerages are trying to eat your lunch15 January 2008
Rather than sitting around and waiting for the day when there is a fully transparent market for short-selling, it seems many of the world’s prime brokerages are expanding into new revenue streams now. This isn’t entirely new, of course. Prime brokerages have long nurtured start-up hedge funds in an effort to bring into being their future clients (see related postings). But this time, things are different. According to the FT,
The hedge fund industry has a pretty simple structure really. Devoid of the distribution and marketing trappings of its mutual fund cousin, the hedge fund industry boils down to an artist (the fund manager), his business manager (the ops head), his agent (the marketer) and a small cadre of service providers (an accountant, a lawyer, a landlord, an administrator, a prime broker, and a data provider). Occasionally, a hedge fund might engage the services of an outside consultant (a head-hunter, a business consultant etc.). So it appears that the prime brokers are fashioning themselves as a sort of turn-key hedge fund industry - able to provide everything but the fund management itself. This puts them in direct competition, as the FT points out, with such apparently disparate firms as PwC and McKinsey. Says the FT,
The big question will be how scalable are these ancillary services? The prime brokerage business is relatively concentrated since it’s highly scalable (see related posting). But can the world’s largest players translate this dominance into businesses requiring largely customized services?
Comments »Asset Alliance becomes a SPAC snack. Reminds us of similar tack from way back.9 January 2008
We were intrigued by a news item this morning about the reverse take-over of a publicly-traded company by Asset Alliance, an asset management firm holding minority positions in several small hedge fund firms. Asset Alliance’s business model (not dissimilar to RAB Capital, Front Point or Affiliated Managers Group) reminds us of the old Internet incubators of the late 1990s. This is not to suggest that manager incubators will suffer he same fate as their e-business cousins, since e-business incubators relied on “exit events” to make money. By contrast, these manager incubators receive ongoing cash flows from the management and performance fees of their managers (split roughly 50/50 in this case). It seems that manager incubators are in the game to build diversified asset management firms more quickly than if they were to hire their own portfolio managers, not just to cash out (although AMG’s near-IPO of AQR suggests top-of-the-market exits are always in vogue).
Comments »Hedge fund closures to fall in 2010?2 January 2008Much of the research conducted on hedge funds relies on the fidelity of a small number of hedge fund databases that count on the voluntary reporting of returns by the world’s hedge fund managers. Due to the voluntary nature of these databases, one might be excused for wondering if managers’ decisions to either begin submitting data or to cease submitting data would have a material effect on the reported performance of the hedge fund industry as a whole. The question of why hedge fund’s stop reporting data has recently come back to the fore with this article in the Fall edition of the Journal of Portfolio Management by Alex Grecu, Burton Malkiel and Atanu Saha. The idea underpinning the article has been around for a few years and was actually included in a presentation and paper submitted by the authors to the Atlanta Fed in late 2006 (see related posting). They find that, like human life expectancy figures, the likelihood of death goes down with age - after a certain point. In other words, if hedge funds make it past the critical first few years, then they are quite likely to stay alive for the long term. The chart below shows the lifespan of hedge funds in the widely quoted TASS hedge fund database. (Note: funds that were still alive by April 2004, the date of the study, were treated as having a “duration” equal to their age by that date).
Comments »European Central Bank: Hedge funds did not likely “play a central role” in August’s mayhem16 December 2007
Acknowledging the role of hedge funds in August’s turmoil, the report points out that September’s rebound illustrated that “…other hedge funds stepped in to buy assets at bargain prices, thereby providing rather than consuming liquidity.” In fact, the ECB’s own analysis shows that only 5% of single-manager hedge funds invested directly in mortgage-backed securities and that YTD returns are tracking to historical norms (chart - right) Nevertheless, continues the report, a “vicious circle could set in, whereby forced liquidations cause losses, margin calls from counterparties and investor redemptions, leading to even more asset sales.” And if high yield bonds and credit derivatives are added to the mix, then 20% of global hedge funds assets “could be affected by the recent turbulence.” (Note that the chart at the right also shows the lack of return persistence in hedge funds. As the year progress, big year-one winners can’t seem to repeat. Thankfully, nor can big year-one losers.)
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In a 
(Madrid, April 25) - The former head of the pension for a large US state has suggested the value provided by funds of funds has increased as a result of market turbulence. Al Samper, former Head of Virginia Retirement System told a gathering of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analysts Association in Madrid recently that protection against the idiosyncratic risks of single strategy hedge funds is more important than ever for institutional investors. He also told the audience that a long term investment horizon was a prerequisite for adding alternatives to a traditional portfolio.
Last year, we published a couple of articles on the somewhat Malthusian possibility of a global shortage of stocks available for borrowing. (”
On Friday, 
After all the negative press about hedge funds over the past few months, one can be excused for believing that every other hedge fund is blowing up. In fact, 
Many countries around the world take a somewhat skeptical view of wealth. While many people in those countries aspire to be wealthy, those who have achieved wealth are usually expected not to flaunt it. As a result, foreigners are often struck by the respect and admiration engendered by wealth in the United States. In the US, wealth isn’t just tolerated, it is celebrated. 
A new survey shows that hedge fund managers are negative on the U.S. economy, yet positive on the prospects for the hedge fund industry in 2008 (
Hot on the heels of 
The Alternative Investment Management Association (
We’re usually content to let sleeping dogs lie after issuing an opinion on mass media bias against hedge funds. But we have to quickly follow-up on 
With so many “alternatives” these days (alternative energy, alternative music, alternative lifestyles) it’s no wonder a recent survey found there was general confusion about the definition of “alternative investments”. 
Several studies over the past few years have suggested that the much heralded “hedge fund alpha” is declining. These studies have examined average hedge fund performance (overall, or funds within a specific strategy). As a result, they have been unable to differentiate between two possible causes of the decline: an increase in the number of unskilled managers who generate negative alpha and a decrease in the number of hot-shots who produce large alphas (essentially, the skew of the hedge fund return distribution). 
Golfers are familiar with the term “mulligan” - the practice of re-doing a tee shot if the golfer duffs the ball into the woods, onto the next fairway or over the fence into someone’s backyard. God knows, we are quite familiar with mulligans at AllAboutAlpha.com. 
Here is a sample of the news stories we didn’t get a chance to explore in detail this week. As usual, all of them can be found on the Alpha-ticker above or in the news items section of AllAboutAlpha.com (free registration may be required for a few of these).
If Britt Harris is successful, the Bush family might be envious of the First Lady’s former teaching colleagues back in Texas. Harris, the CIO of the $100 billion 
North Americans woke up Saturday morning to two major newspaper stories that blame recent financial upheaval on the sheer complexity of hedge fund strategies. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed that “
Institutional investors seem have developed a love/hate relationship with hedge funds according to 
In January, it appeared hedge fund seeding was on the come back (
Matthias Knab, founder of the hedge fund newsletter 
Hedge fund ”seeding” has been around for several years as a flood of new hedge funds hit the market. Academic research has shown that younger hedge funds outperform (although this is questioned by those who argue that hedge fund data is biased by new funds that only choose to report if and when they outperform. But seeding’s apparent re-emergence this year, after a relatively tough year for new launches, is only the tip of the iceberg and heralds a new phase in the maturation of the hedge fund industry.
The Financial Times had an 
Thank you to those who emailed us questions for best-selling author Richard Bookstaber. We had a wide-ranging discussion with him Tuesday evening and will tell you more about his latest views tomorrow.
In case you missed it (and we suspect you did unless you make a habit of reading monster 242-page publications like this) the European Central Bank’s December “