Volatility further increased in the third quarter, with a number of notable “events.” First, the People’s Bank of China devalued the Chinese yuan (RMB, CNY) by almost 2% in early August. Ostensibly one step on the path to a designation of special drawing rights by the International Monetary Fund, it was, in fact, a response…
Diversified growth funds (DGFs) have garnered significant attention and assets—particularly amongst UK defined benefit pension schemes—as a less volatile source of long-term growth. DGFs can be valuable tools for pension portfolio management, but only if trustees understand what they are buying and how it fits into the context of the total portfolio. The simple bifurcation of the available products into traditional and absolute return strategies can be a starting point for trustees to help make sense of the market and set appropriate risk/return expectations across different market environments.
Given a choice today between competing investment strategies, activists would not be near the top of our list, as the fawning attention over successful activists has narrowed the available opportunity set by boosting the available pool of money and drawing in new managers.
This chart book presents representative marketable and hedge fund manager performance for second quarter 2015.
Long/Short Hedge Fund Strategies At the midpoint of 2015, hedge funds as a group have outpaced widely quoted US large capitalization equity market indexes. Through June 30, 2015, the S&P 500 Index is up 1.2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is flat at 0.0% for the year, while the Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index…
This chart book presents representative marketable and hedge fund manager performance for first quarter 2015. The median Global ex US Small-Cap Equity manager posted the highest return (5.9%) for the quarter; the median manager in this asset class returned -1.6% for the one-year period ending March 31, 2015. The median US REIT manager posted the highest…
Many fundamental long/short hedge funds gravitate toward small- and mid-cap equities on the long side and focus on larger-cap equities on the short side. During the last three quarters of 2014, the larger cap S&P 500 meaningfully outperformed the smaller cap Russell 2000® (cumulative returns of 11.7% versus 3.7%, respectively), creating strong headwinds for investors…
Executive Summary In an environment of low equity and bond returns, investors may again be looking to portable alpha as a possible solution. However, portable alpha is complex and comes with many risks, not the least of which is identifying the sources of alpha, as well as ensuring the liquidity of the alpha sources, monitoring…
This chart book presents representative marketable and hedge fund manager performance for fourth quarter and calendar year 2014. US Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) managers posted the largest median returns for the fourth quarter (14.2%) and the one-year period ending December 31, 2014 (31.2%).
In the fourth quarter, many of the trends that had played out throughout 2014 continued, and in some cases accelerated. Like most quarters this year, on the surface, fourth quarter hedge fund returns (0.7% for the Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index and 0.5% for the HFRI Fund-Weighted Composite Index) look disappointing when compared to widely…