Tag:
indexes
Latest Headlines
Latest Headlines
Mutual funds endure a rough year
Hedge funds had a rough year in 2011. The average fund fell 4 to 5 percent, which qualifies the year as a real stinker.
Mutual funds did not fare much better.The 8,000 plus U.S. diversified equity funds lost 2.9 percent for the year on average, despite a huge surge in the fourth quarter.
S
Does Citigroup experience make Bank of America reverse split less likely?
Recall that Citigroup reverse split its stock back in May, exchanging one share at $45 for every 10 shares trading at $4.52. The company's goals were to get the stock price out of the penny stock zone in order to be able to better market it to big institutions and perhaps to change its status as t
Funds look for ways to short the muni market
You have to credit Meredith Whitney with one thing: She really galvanized people to take a look at the muni market. Some have decided she and other super bears are nuts. Others are nervous and looking to hedge.
That brings up an interesting issue raised by the Financial Times . How do you g
How much will pensions invest in hedge funds?
A lot of institutions got burned in the hedge fund pyrotechnics that flowed from the financial crisis. But pensions are as interested as ever in investing in hedge funds specifically and alternatives generically. Agecroft Partners predicts that pension plans will significantly increase their exp
Mystery: Why did ETFs plunge so much
Last Thursday's market pyrotechnics have spawned a lot of mysteries. One of the more vexing concerns is exchange traded funds. For some reason, many ETFs plummeted in price much more than the value of their underlying indexes at the peak of selling. Some ETF investors--and many are retail investor
Suspect hedge fund index figures?
Hedge funds have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 over the past decade, right? That's the conventional wisdom. But the magnitude of the outperformance may be less than we think, given problems with index measures that are familiar to mutual fund pros.
Survivorship bias, Breakingview
Markit puts planned index on hold
If you are a participant in the troubled CDS universe, you've heard of Markit. It's best know for its indexes on CDSs and asset-backed securities, upon which Wall Street built some derivatives that allowed some people to make fortunes betting against subprime-related securities while others tanked
The costs of alpha
Kenneth French, of Fama-French fame, has drawn attention for a working paper that calculated the cost of trying to generate alpha. The New York Times relates how the Dartmouth finance professor simply added up all the costs of investing--fees, transaction costs and other things--and then deduc
Will active ETFs storm the fund market?
It seems like we've been talking about the rise of actively managed exchange traded funds for a long time. But only now are they becoming a reality. The SEC has approved Invesco's Powershares Capital Management's actively traded ETF with some restrictions, paving the way for them to actually
How Kervial did it
The question on everyone's mind is: how did he do it? Societe Generale believes that, Jerome Kervial placed large long bets in one portfolio and then created fake hedges in another portfolio. So instead of hedging, as he was supposed to do, Kervial was effectively speculating that various stocks
