The crux of whether a particular MLM is a pyramid scheme, and thus is illegal, is this: is a particular participant paid primarily on the basis of the products he sells or primarily on the basis of the new participants he recruits? The crux for Ackman's trade is whether he can persuade enforcement authorities that it is the latter.

Vikas Shah talks to Alpha Hunter Timothy O'Neill Dunne about the travel sector.

Guest interviewer James Stafford talks to Andrew McCarthy about the new trends in energy trading.

AllAboutAlpha talks to Andrew Lo about the LIBOR scandal and what's next.

Charles J. French, CAIA, discusses the intricacies of negotiating finals with Christopher Van Dyke, CAIA, CFA, Advisor, Arnerich Massena, Inc. (CVD); Kweku Obed, CAIA, CFA, Principal, Mercer Investment Consulting, Inc. (KO); and Thomas H. Dodd, CAIA, CFA, FSA, President, Stratford Advisory Group (TD).

"To learn more about the state and future of the UK economy, we speak to David Blanchflower (Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College) and John Cridland CBE (Director General of the CBI)."

Alpha Hunter Jeff Joseph talks with AllAboutAlpha about the changes in the regulatory landscape and what this means for hedge fund marketing.

It seemed earlier this year that many investors, including hedge funds, were betting heavily that there would be a ‘hard landing’ for the economy of the People’s Republic. Where do you stand, we asked Douglas, hard landing or soft?

Why has Singapore attained such prominence as it has? That is a mixture of nature and nurture. It has always been a trading hub due to its location, and this has allowed it over the centuries to develop as a professional and commercial services hub as well, which has anchored a capital markets ecosystem.

James Clayton, CEO of Ingenious Investments talks to AllAboutAlpha about investing in media and entertainment. Their portfolio includes films such as Avatar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class and TV productions such as Law and Order UK, Monroe and Foyle's War.

Vikas Shah speaks to Nicholas Economides about the Greek opportunity.

What we can learn from the one-in-a-million-year event that wiped trillions from the global economy

AllAboutAlpha talks to Jalak Jobanputra, MD at RTP Ventures on the mobile payments market, which is set transact over US$1 trillion by 2016.

A deeper look at alternatives with Dr. Bob Swarup, a world-renowned expert and commentator on alternatives and financial markets as well as being a visiting fellow at London School of Economics.

AllAboutAlpha talks to Market Wizards' Jack Schwager about what makes a great trader.

Charles Skorina discusses what it takes to be a CIO with Sam Gallo.

New columnist Charles Skorina interviews Peter Stein, veteran alternative investments professional.

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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

Alpha is often found in the company of those investors who are earliest in seeing the first hints of future events unfolding. Topsy is a new source of that capability.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jeremy King of Knight Pacific discusses his contrarian views on investing in Asia.

Alpha Hunters Andrew Timpson and Joseph Schlater of Busara Advisors talk about what it takes to get an emerging manager allocation.

Chris Brodie has been trading commodities for over 20 years, and set up Krom River in 2006. Scotsman Brodie relocated to Zug in Switzerland several years ago and has no regrets about the move. The fund’s best year so far was 2008 when it rose by 37% while the GSCI fell by two thirds, and it was also up in August of this year. Krom River are running both discretionary and systematic funds, and also have a dedicated agricultural vehicle. We touched on a range of topics that CAIA candidates and charterholders will be familiar with. Krom River is a signatory of the Hedge Fund Standards Board that has been discussed on AAA.

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).

In Part II of this Alpha Hunter series, we examine the role intellectual property plays in the U.S. economy.

Dennis Lohfert, founder of Ion Asset Architecture, discusses quantitative trading strategies and how they are affected by current market conditions.

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

A new academic paper suggests oil and other resources are spiking and retreating thanks to speculative activity, including trading by hedge funds. From our viewpoint: duh...

Patent trolls aren't the only ones hiding under the bridge and collecting tolls on intellectual property. Alpha Hunter Michael Friedman discusses the hidden alpha potential in IP.

AllAboutAlpha.com spoke to John Zito, portfolio manager for credit opportunities at Brencourt, about some of the strategies Brencourt has employed and continues to employ in its search for alpha. He observed that one of the main investment strategies pursued by the Credit Opportunities Fund in particular is capital structure arbitrage.

The adage that everything in moderation is a good thing doesn't necessarily apply to funds of hedge funds, according to a recent academic report.

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

Dr. Bob Swarup, of CAIA, and a Partner of Pension Corporation LLP, in London, was the keynote speaker at the Emerging Managers Forum on July 7. He presented “The Outlook for Alternatives in Today’s Economic Environment.”

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