Research Publications Archive

Emerging Markets – Navigating Through Rough Waters

EM equity valuations are the key driver of returns over the long term. The benefit from valuation mean reversion should be substantial, as EM equities trade at a 35% discount to DM equities and a 45% discount to U.S. equities, compared to our assumed fair value discount of 10%. We expect EM equities to remain…

Multi-Manager Funds: A Toolkit for Evaluation

Institutional investors considering an allocation to a hedge fund are typically reasonably equipped to evaluate its suitability for their portfolios. However, traditional yardsticks are inadequate for evaluating multi-manager (MM) hedge funds. Due to the uniqueness of their organizational structure and fund terms, MM funds often exhibit unusual yet ultimately explainable behavior. The intention of this…

Treasury Floats a Noteworthy Idea

The new Treasury FRNs are attractive not only for money market funds and institutions that roll T-bills within large liquidity or collateral pools, but also for other institutional investors intent on reducing interest rate risk within their fixed income allocation.

A Framework for Benchmarking Private Investments

Executive Summary Private investments often play an important role in an investor’s portfolio, yet the inconsistent methodologies typically used to evaluate private investment performance and public market performance result in a lack of understanding about true relative performance. The two most common measures of investment performance—time-weighted returns (TWRs) and money-weighted returns, typically an internal rate…

Investment Opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa’s changing political and economic landscape over recent decades offers investment prospects worthy of consideration. In this report, we address the key opportunities and risks associated with public (long-only and hedge funds) and private market investing in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on Frontier Africa. We find that public markets exhibit attractively low correlations to…

Our View on 2014: It’s All Relative

Looking ahead to 2014 we are focused on several key themes, among them the evolution of global monetary policy, the likelihood of European equities exceeding diminished expectations, and the headwinds, risks, and opportunities associated with emerging markets equities.

Deleveraging: Were the Fears Overdone?

Monetary policy is an important wildcard, but deleveraging has faded as a headwind for U.S. economic growth and investors would be unwise to weigh it heavily in their investment decisions.

The Endowment Model 2.0: A Success Story That Endures

The endowment model of investing is far from broken. Early adopters of the model continue to push forward, reaping impressive gains along the way. In this paper we provide a practitioner’s perspective on the endowment model, the experience of some early adopters of the strategy, and the execution of the model in the current environment.