To some, choosing the most talented money managers is easy. All an advisor has to do is examine their track records over, say, three to five years, and pick those that have performed the best. After all, that's more or less how we go about...
To the people who love them, style boxes are great diversification tools. Bob Olstein is not one of those people. Those boxes are artificial barriers, and somebody should rip them up, says Olstein, manager of top-performing Olstein Financial Alert...
Separate accounts or mutual funds? The choice can be difficult, and often advisors feel compelled to pick one and ignore the other. Indeed, until recently, the case against mixing two investment types in the same portfolio has been a potent one...
The shine is starting to dim on investments in gold. True, bullion rose about 20 percent in 2003, and gold stocks improved more than twice as much (42 percent), thanks to a sliding dollar's burnishing of the precious metal's safe-haven status. And...
Three years ago Barton Biggs, the curmudgeonly chief global strategist of Morgan Stanley, said a hedge funds had gripped the United States and Europe and that a was inflating. Biggs allowed that he didn't know when the hedge fund bubble would...
Three years ago, at the height of the equities run-up, investors had little reason to be interested in hedge funds. The intervening years have brought with them some important lessons about diversification, and this has made alternative...
ARBITRAGE STRATEGIES Convertible Arbitrage: Managers invest in companies' convertible securities. Typically, they will be long the convertible bond and short the common stock of the same company. Positions are designed to generate profits from the...
When stocks plunged in 2000, dispirited fund investors looked enviously at hedge funds. By selling short or investing in mergers, hedge fund owners could make money even when the S&P 500 collapsed. But hedge funds are far from a perfect solution...
If a recent SEC staff report is any indication, it may not be long before hedge fund investment professionals are regulated as heavily as their brethren at brokerage firms. The Sept. 2003 report, entitled Implications of the Growth of Hedge Funds...
Canada has a long history as a haven for prescription-drug bargain hunters, for instance, and for draft-dodgers. Soon, we might well add American investors to that list of shelter seekers. A number of Canadian investment vehicles most notably...