Unlike the previously proposed revisions, Pluris believes the approved FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) revisions will not hurt hedge funds. The new revisions cover hedge fund transparency and diclosure issues, starting June 2009. Espen Robak, president of Pluris Valuation Advisors LLC, praised FASB, “This is great news, not only for investors but for reporting entities as well,” Robak said. “As […]
The chorus of pundits critical of VaR, traditional risk models, and Modern Portfolio Theory has grown louder over the years with a crescendo in the past few months with the public defeats of these theories in failing to defend firms against over-exposure in RMBS, CMBS, CDS and numerous other shaky acronyms. Although I agree that stat-based risk management has its […]
James McCallum posts an interesting blog entry that claims links between Stanford and South American money laundering cartels, and details what it would mean for tax payers. From the article: The allegations that surfaced suggesting that Sanford (sic) Financial may be linked to money laundering for Latin American drug cartels through The Bank of Antigua and related banking enterprises in […]
The 3Q08 Pershing Square letter, written by portfolio manager Bill Ackman, is a great example of the salient decision making that good fundamental managers employ. They strive to eliminate unanswerable questions as not to distract the firm from their ultimate goal; profiting from fundamental research. “We spend little time trying to outguess market prognosticators about the short-term future of the […]
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Playing a hedge fund banker turned killer, Dougray Scott stars in the ‘credit crunch’ movie: New Town Killers. It being shown for the first time in Scotland tonight as part of the Glasgow Film Festival’s fifth anniversary. Filmed in Edinburgh’s streets, according to UK’s DailyRecord, the movie is high octane, violent and bloody. New Town […]
TurtleTrader is a record of an exceptional financial adventure. Author and leading news resource for the Turtles, Michael Covel, writes about the entrepreneurial nature of the world of trading, also following the original members from the experimental stage, through to today. In 1983 Richard Dennis started an experiment, training student volunteers with no experience his rules and investment philosophy (which […]
Despite the decline of -74.2% for the MSCI Index in 2008, the Pharos Russia Fund produced a positive 3 year annualized return of 1.3% with 24.8% volatility as compared to the MSCI Russia Index, their 5 year returns also showed a strong outperformance against the MSCI Russia Index. The 11 year period of January 1998 through December 2008, which encompasses […]
Informative book by Jason Scharfman on, well, pretty much everything you need to run a hedge fund, from risk management to disaster recovery, all need-to-know material for both investors and hedge fund analysts. Included are examples of past hedge fund management mistakes, showing exactly where the managers went wrong, and how to avoid downfalls such as the ‘but everyone is doing it’ excuse, among […]
“Bad times are boom times for some.” The article starts off with US resident Dmitry Orlov, from Leningrad, who has been living on a semi-self-sustainable boat in a form ‘bourgeois survivalism’ for 2 ½ years, riding a bicycle and skipping the TV. After the downfall of the Soviet Union he learned a lesson for future reference: “When faced with a […]
This quick test will tell you if you have the mentality of the world’s greatest investors: 1) A blackjack player has 19, takes a hit and gets a 2 for 21. Is the decision to take a hit a: a. Good decision b. Bad decision 2) You buy a house for $1 million that subsequently declines in value to $500,000. […]
I received an advance copy of an article from the financial pages of next weeks New Yorker, “A Smarter Stimulus”, where James Surowiecki describes the pros and cons of Obama’s plan to include more than a hundred billion dollars in individual tax rebates in his stimulus package. Although his promised tax cuts are a surefire political winner, he has also earned […]
This morning when I woke up I found an email from Richard Dukas of Dukas Public Relations, in my inbox. In this short interview with Fox News, Richard discusses the difficulties in finding jobs in this environment and what is the best way to overcome them. Most interesting I thought was the segment about salary expectation. Don’t expect to make […]
Michael Lewis and David Einhorn recently wrote a two part Op-Ed article in the NY Times titled “The End of the Financial World as We Know It” and “How to Repair a Broken Financial World.” In it they discuss the precarious position of the status of US financial markets as the bastion of high financial thinking in the global economy […]
BKCG WHITEPAPER – Words: The New Transparency
Clients are demanding that investment managers communicate more than just data Executive Summary Transparency has typically been equated with access to data (trade, exposure, valuation, etc.), but the financial crisis and fund scandals have led clients and investors to demand more. Major surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate communication is now in demand. Clients want managers to put the numbers in […]