Alternative Investments

In the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal, investors have been shunning fledgling hedge funds, betting instead on large funds with long track records. But small funds have key advantages....More

When the governments undermines faith in the local currencies, people start searching for ways to protect their savings....More

K. Geert Rouwenhorst was among the first to consider commodity futures as an asset class, and his thinking is behind the proliferation of commodity future ETFs. He gave advisors attending the IMCA conference this week a primer on why commodity futures can play a role in an investment portfolio....More

Managed futures funds posted a third consecutive monthly gain in March with a 1.2 percent uptick measured by the Newedge CTA Index. For the year to date, the index is up 2.8 percent. Besides the uptrends in natural gas and crude oil captured by many funds, copper was successfully played from the short side. The month’s standout move, however, was a limit-down swoon in corn prices following a USDA grain report which caught a number of commodity trading advisors by surprise....More

A survey recently commissioned by the Hedge Fund Associationproduced some statistics bound to raise investor eyebrows. In the quest for alpha, nearly half of hedge fund professionals surveyed believe their competitors engage in illegal activity, more than one third have personally felt pressure to break rules, and about one third have witnessed misconduct in the workplace. To boot, more than half of respondents reported the SEC is ineffective in detecting, investigating and prosecuting rule violations....More