All Alternatives articles – Page 159
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Features
Mainstream or not?
The poor performance of major equity markets in recent years and falling bond yields have encouraged greater focus on so-called ‘alternative assets’. Commercial property investment is often conveniently placed in this category, along with private equity and hedge funds. But is such a classification helpful or meaningful? The term ‘alternative’ ...
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A tale of two indices
Are emerging markets currencies a source of pain or pleasure? Looking at MSCI EMF equity index returns, investors might be forgiven for thinking the answer is always ‘pain’. However, the ELMI+ index of currency forward contracts tells a potentially more pleasant story. Given the significant return volatility patterns evident in ...
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Increase your options
The creation of the euro played a bad trick on currency managers. To begin with, currency managers had strong performance and information ratios, and this was managed with only 20 currencies (which given cross hedging gave a fair opportunity set). A number of research studies suggested that the alphas in ...
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New twist to an old idea
After an investor approves an allocation to funds of hedge funds the question arises of which structure to use. For many, the most common form of investment will be through shares in an open-ended company, often set up as a limited liability partnership, or through one of many structured products ...
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Taking a shine to gold
A liquid asset with low correlation with equities and fixed income and negative correlation with the dollar should be relatively easy to sell. Yet funds have shown an almost complete aversion to gold. A raft of new investment products and a sustained educational campaign by the World Gold Council (WGC), ...
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Safe in the forest
Forestry investment has attracted increasing attention in recent years from pension fund managers looking for alternatives to the uncertainty and lower returns experienced with the major asset classes. A key feature of Irish forestry investments has been the steady positive real rate of return, with the lowest volatility of any ...
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Delivering the performance
Most investors recognise that currencies have a large impact on the returns of international and global portfolios. By selecting a multi-currency benchmark, the investor, implicitly or explicitly, makes decisions on a set of underlying assets and on the desired level of embedded currency exposure. There is a need to analyse ...
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Lose your constraints
Claire Smith A couple of years ago, currency overlay mandates were fairly few and far between. Most pension funds left overseas currency exposures unhedged and those that did seek to manage them sought, in the main, to expunge the risk and accept the resulting profit or loss as simply part ...
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Come on in, the water's lovely
Alternative investment strategies are registering notably high satisfaction rates in terms of performance among European institutional investors – despite the three-year bear market. The percentage of investors whose returns have so far met or exceeded expectations ranges from 66% for private equity, 79% for hedge fund investment and impressive figures ...
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The benefit of the relative value strategy
Besides being an asset class in their own right, hedge funds can also be considered and used as a diversification tool within a specific traditional asset class. To incorporate hedge funds as a separate asset class into a global diversified portfolio, it is recommended to select the appropriate number of ...
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Art for investment's sake
Any dealer will give prospective investors the same advice – spend as much as you can afford, buy the very best work available and be prepared to hold on to it for 10 years. This mantra is central to the ethos of Philip Hoffman’s new Fine Art Fund. Hoffman, a ...
