Summer of 1,000 Posts: Hedge Fund Industry Trends
Jul 5th, 2009 | Filed under: AAA Newsreels, Featured Post, Portable Alpha & Alpha/Beta Separation, Today's Post
Today, we bring you another installment of our “Summer of 1,000 posts” (more…)
This week’s sampling from our archives covers the topic of Hedge Fund Industry Trends…
HF managed accounts may not be no-brainer. May require quarter - maybe half - a brain after all. Hedge fund managed accounts used to have only “limitations”. Now they have “drawbacks”…
A three-way battle for supremacy in Hedge Fund Industry 2.0 Hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds seem to be positioning themselves for the “renaissance” in Hedgistan.
Does HF “enlightenment” actually herald an end to the industry as we know it? A column in the FT compares the current state of the hedge fund industry to the e-business industry circa 1999. Do the uncanny parallels between the two industries mean we can now predict what’s to come? More…





Linear regression models (a.k.a. factor models) have a number of emerging applications in the hedge fund industry. One of the most often-cited here and elsewhere is hedge fund replication (
Although the mainstream financial media now routinely ridicules “exotic” investment strategies such as portable alpha, institutional interest in managing alpha and beta separately has not gone away. As we have reported on these pages, portable alpha strategies performed poorly in 2008 not because there was anything wrong with the concept, but because the supposedly-uncorrelated alpha sources happened to keel over and die along with the market. As a result, portable alpha investors lost money on the beta side and the alpha side.
On November 25, the Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System (SERS) announced its Q3 results. Public pensions across the US issued similar press releases detailing the Q3 carnage. But what makes this pension plan different is its widely publicized use of portable alpha (see our April 2008
