Insights

The drawdown that rattled markets in March — triggered by a sharp escalation in Middle East tensions and rapid repositioning in energy and rates — did something useful. It separated two structures that are routinely grouped under the same ...

Two investors can subscribe to the same hedge fund, on the same headline terms, and still end up paying different effective performance fees. That is not a legal curiosity. It is a portfolio issue — and it deserves more attention than most ...

Short-dated cash is no longer a rounding error. The right question is not "what is the standard hedge fund benchmark?" — there isn't one. The right question is: what role does this sleeve play in the portfolio, and what hurdle proves it is ...

A 1% macro allocation cannot hedge a portfolio. It can decorate one. Yet that is approximately where most institutional macro sleeves sit — large enough to appear on the asset allocation chart, too small to change outcomes in the scenarios ...

Over the past 15 years, roughly two-thirds of the average event-driven fund's return is explained by equity beta, credit, and commodity factor exposure. Only about a third is alpha that cannot be attributed to systematic risk premia. That ...

In a full pass-through multi-strat, the average LP keeps $0.41 of every dollar of gross return. The rest goes to expenses and fees. That number — which has circulated in Barclays and BNP Paribas survey work — is not the worst-case ...

In April 2020, the Federal Reserve injected $1.6 trillion into Treasury markets in a matter of weeks. The proximate cause wasn't a credit crisis or a bank run. It was a leveraged carry trade unwinding faster than the plumbing could handle. ...

A family office CIO shared a real-life story with me recently. His principal—a retired tech executive—was furious. The "high-income equity strategy" they'd allocated $3M to in early 2024 had just lagged the S&P 500 by 22 percentage ...

“Quant” is not a strategy. It’s a production method. That distinction matters because allocator outcomes diverge based on what kind of quant you own. A trend fund can be operationally simple and still blow up from leverage and execution. A ...