The Total Cost of Alternatives: A Fee & Terms Budgeting Framework for Absolute-Return Allocations

Institutional investors and family office CIOs know that not all “absolute-return” vehicles are created equal. Hedge funds, UCITS liquid alternatives, and bank-provided QIS products can all deliver alternative strategies – but each comes ...
12 min read

Liquidity Isn’t Cash: Building a Portfolio Liquidity Budget

Liquidity is often thought of as simply “liquid” or “illiquid,” but in reality it exists along a continuum. It represents how quickly and reliably an asset can be converted to cash without significant loss in value. At one extreme, cash ...
5 min read

Position Sizing & Sell Discipline: A Modern Allocator’s Framework

Position sizing and sell discipline rarely get the same airtime as asset allocation or manager selection, yet they influence long-term portfolio outcomes just as much. In many investment processes, these decisions sit in a grey area—left ...
11 min read

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De-Crowding the Magnificent Seven

The “Magnificent 7” era of hedge-fund positioning peaked in mid-2024, when Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla together sat inside almost every long/short portfolio. By June that year prime-broker crowding indices ...
7 min read

The Quant-Shop Crossover: How High-Frequency Firms And Systematic Specialists Are Quietly Building Discretionary Pod Allocations

For two decades “quant” and “discretionary” sat in different chapters of the hedge-fund playbook. Yet in the wake of crowded factor premia, shrinking bid-ask spreads, and a brutal war for talent, the sharpest electronic-trading firms are ...
6 min read

The Art and Science of Portfolio Rebalancing: A Timeless Framework for All Market Environments

Portfolio rebalancing is one of the most consistently overlooked drivers of long-term portfolio resilience. While asset allocation gets the strategic spotlight, it’s rebalancing that ensures portfolios stay aligned with their intended risk ...
10 min read

The Reinsurance Renaissance

Insurance‑Linked Securities (ILS) let capital‑markets investors shoulder insurance risk — most visibly through catastrophe (“cat”) bonds. In a cat bond, investors collect a floating coupon until a contractually defined disaster (for ...
5 min read

Monthly QIS Review - July 2025

Executive Summary July 2025 delivered a muted yet positive month for quantitative-investment strategies: the average composite gained ≈ +0.10 % and the gap between the strongest and weakest composites widened only slightly to ≈ 5.3 ...
4 min read

When the Market Maker Becomes the Market

The most sophisticated trading firms in the world built their reputations on precision, discipline, and managing risk down to the millisecond. So when India's securities regulator freezes over half a billion dollars and accuses one of ...
4 min read

Strategic Tail-Risk Hedging: Building Antifragility into Institutional Portfolios

Severe market shocks—the far-left tails of the return distribution—threaten not only short-term performance but the long-run compounding of institutional portfolios. Traditionally, allocators treated tail-risk protection as a grudging cost ...
8 min read
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