Alternative Investment

News Market Neutral L/S struggles as momentum stocks take a hit

Risk assets failed to reach a bottom early December despite the U.S and China agreeing to negotiate on trade at the G20 summit. The near-term outlook remains unclear from political uncertainties, which prevent investors from adding risk in portfolios despite lower equity (...)

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Opinion Hedge Funds agree on where rates are going

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Innovation Listing of the world’s first crypto-currency index ETP on SIX

With the Amun Crypto Basket HODL5 ETP (ticker: HODL, ISIN: CH0445689208) the Zug-based fin-tech company Amun AG launches the world’s first exchange listed crypto-currency index product (ETP), a SIX Swiss Exchange (...)

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Strategy L/S Equity strategies bear the brunt of the turmoil

L/S Equity and Event-Driven strategies underperformed due to their elevated market beta. L/S Equity strategies also suffered due to the rotation in risk factors which saw growth/ momentum stocks underperforming value and low beta (...)

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Opinion Why we would start reweighting U.S. stock-pickers

We are past the peak of the U.S. earnings reports. In the past, any unusually high individual stock volatility after an earnings announcement was a pattern that only appeared at macro inflection points.

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Opinion Hedge Funds Take A Hit in early Q4

Hedge funds were not immune to recent market developments. They were down during the first half of October due to the underperformance of CTA, L/S Equity, and Special Situations strategies. Meanwhile, Merger Arbitrage, Fixed Income Arbitrage, Global Macro and L/S Equity (...)

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Opinion Perspectives on L/S Equity strategies after the Selloff

Risk assets have yet to find stable ground after the recent turmoil. The rebound in equities since the October 11th trough appears fragile. Last week, the minutes of the latest FOMC meeting were hawkish and Italy’s 10-year sovereign spread with Germany jumped to levels unseen (...)

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Opinion What happened to hedge funds’alpha since the summer?

While hedge fund performance and alpha were honorable until the summer, our analysis suggests that they erased about 2.5% of alpha since June, with no turn in sight yet in September.

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Strategy Higher volatility puts Low Beta strategies in asweet spot

With the U.S. equity market under selling pressure in early September, the MSCI World has registered its worst week since late March, down almost -1.5%.

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Opinion What alikely NXP-Qcomdeal break means for merger arbitrage

Market conditions have been supportive since early July, but the flattening of the Treasury curve raises questions about the probability of a U.S. recession next year. Fund manager surveys suggest investors have erred on the side of caution (...)

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Strategy Stockpicking strategies remain in the driving seat

Market developments in May saw some trend reversals across the fixed income and commodity space. On the one hand, the unfolding of the Italian political crisis coincided with a rebound of U.S. Treasuries during the second half of May. On the other (...)

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Opinion Macro Managers are scratching their heads just like you

Europe took center stage this week, with further developments in the Italian political saga reminding investors that there are still powerful Eurosceptic forces at play and forcing investors to end their hopes of meaningful eurozone reforms. However, fading prospects of (...)

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News Most turbulences are behind for merger arbitrageurs

Market volatility also played out, as well as the growing share of jumbo deals, usually more sensitive to adverse developments. Amid very supportive conditions for M&A (from the tax reform in particular), weaker deal rationales are also mentioned as a greater source of (...)

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News Low Beta strategies lead the pack as equities drop

Unstable market conditions were supportive for hedge funds, in relative terms. Liquid hedge fund benchmarks were down -1% in March, with Distressed and Special Situations strategies underperforming. On a positive note, low beta strategies did (...)

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Strategy Time to reinforce neutral fund allocations

We think it is time to strengthen L/S Neutral funds allocation. While they faced months of challenging transversal stock rotations, we expect their environment to improve for several reasons.

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Note Are markets becoming more unstable?

Readers of financial news may believe that ‘market corrections’, or ‘shocks’, or ‘five-sigma events’ are more common than they used to be. Winton Capital Management look at the historical data for a number of financial markets and find that there is no evidence for increasing (...)

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Regulation Regulatory prospects: 2012 and beyond

2009 was a year of intense reflection on the functioning of the financial sector. There followed an intense regulatory activity in 2010, unfortunately with few formal adoptions of regulations. 2011 marked the surge of the will to succeed with provisional schedules. Where do (...)

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News Institutional investor appetite is back for quant funds

The recent CTA performances encourage institutional investors to more closely monitor this type of hedge fund. Thus, according to Preqin, 52% of them wish to increase their exposure to this type of alternative strategy this year (vs 14% last (...)

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Innovation EXQIM announces the launch of Exqim Blue Fund

Created by two former senior executive managers of SGAM AI, Exqim launches Exqim Blue Fund, a multi-asset fund whose investment process is based on quantitative strategies and allocation.

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Pedagogy What is Long/Short Equity ?

Hedge funds apply a vast array of investment strategies which can be more or less complex. In this article, we shall focus on the Long / Short strategy…

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Strategy Agricultural land rush of investment funds!

After launching products indexed to changes in prices of agricultural products, many banks and investment funds are turning now to the land acquisition...

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News Alternative investors hunt yield in post crisis Europe under review at Debtwire’s European Forum

Debtwire hosts its seventh European forum at the Dorchester in London today. Senior bankers, lawyers, investors, financial sponsors, corporate finance and debt advisory specialists will provide their insight on the current state of the debt market, spanning from primary (...)

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Note Hedge funds: The CTAs drift

Since mid-2011, CTAs cumulative loss is between -10.6% (HFRI macro systematic index) and -16.8% (Credit Suisse Managed Futures Index). For the first quarter of this year, CTAs show a drawdown of about 3% which is expected to increase in April (-0.66% for HFRX CTA index) (...)

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Strategy Re-weighting carry strategies

In a context where monetary conditions are more accommodative and sovereign bond yields are back to low levels, it seems appropriate to re-weight carry strategies such as EM-focused Global Macro and L/S Credit.

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Opinion Combining différent styles for risk premia strategies

According to Ronen Israel, principal at AQR Capital Management, four investment “styles” — Value, Momentum, Carry and Defensive — have emerged as compelling sources of alternative returns, backed by economic theory and decades of data across geographies and asset (...)

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News Sunny Summer for Hedge Funds

The Lyxor Hedge Fund index was up a healthy +0.7% since the beginning of August, with progress in most strategies, supported by the positive performance of risky assets. The Bank of England’s activism and the Brexit timeline getting pushed back contributed toward easing (...)

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Strategy Concentrated long-short investing to achieve absolute return

According to Amit Kumar and Ashish Kochar, US Equity Portfolio Manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investment, investor caution on market outlook places increased focus on generating alpha. Long-short equity portfolios have the potential to generate greater alpha as individual (...)

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Strategy A Rising Tide Lifts Most Boats

The broad-based market upswing in the first half of July has benefitted risk assets globally. That follows the release of better than expected economic data in the US and China, suggesting that fears over the strength of the global recovery have been (...)

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Note Deutsche Bank releases annual Alternative Investment Survey highlighting hedge fund sentiment and allocation trends for 2016

Deutsche Bank released its 14th annual Alternative Investment Survey, one of the industry’s largest and longest standing hedge fund investor surveys...

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Strategy Social network: a new trading tool

The use of social networks in finance is no longer limited to communication, marketting or recruitment. Considered as relevant information databases, social networks are now included in news trading systems...

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