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Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index finishes down for November

Dow Jones Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index saw a down month in November finishing down -.18%. The index is still up almost 8% for the year.

Category Nov 2010 Oct 2010 YTD 10
Dow Jones Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index -0.18% 1.92% 7.82%
Convertible Arbitrage 0.04% 1.98% 9.68%
Dedicated Short Bias -2.36% -3.60% -17.64%
Emerging Markets -0.38% 2.21% 9.69%
Equity Market Neutral -2.51% 0.93% -2.54%
Event Driven 0.15% 1.80% 8.37%
Distressed 0.33% 1.32% 7.33%
Multi-Strategy 0.04% 2.17% 9.14%
Risk Arbitrage -1.44% -0.62% 2.01%
Fixed Income Arbitrage 0.74% 1.10% 11.82%
Global Macro -0.52% 1.62% 10.52%
Long/Short Equity 0.46% 2.00% 5.66%
Managed Futures -4.11% 4.29% 6.44%
Multi-Strategy 0.30% 2.03% 7.46%
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What Urban Meyer’s retirement means for investors

Massively winning University of Florida football coach Urban Meyer announced his resignation (again) from coaching. After some health problems and a premature announcement of his exiting coaching last year, this move appears is permanent

What prompted a coach that has built one of the most successful and winningest football programs in the US to just give up and quit?

At the end of the day, I’m very convinced that you’re going to be judged on how you are as a husband and as a father and not on how many bowl games we won (Washington Post blog)

Winners leave on top

Being successful in investing — like life — means knowing when you’ve seen your fortunate share.  Exiting a winner shows a certain gratitude for what you’ve been given, whether monetary abundance, family bliss, or other gifts.  Staying around too long, trying to push the envelope beyond this natural departure point doesn’t work.
I’m sad when I watch Brett Favre play football.  I’m embarrassed for him.  He doesn’t know when to say goodbye.  One of my favorite players of all time, Detroit’s famed running back, Barry Sanders surprised everyone when he just bowed out.  He had a few more years and a few more thousands of yards in him.  But he was done.  Michael Jordan battled with his fate, returning to basketball, when he should have been at home, coaching, investing — anything but continuing to do the same things that had made him so successful in the first place.

Leaving is harder than staying

Sticking around for Meyer would have been the easier decision, but not necessarily the right one.  It took a huge pair of testicles to do what he did.  That’s a true sign of leadership and success.
History has a natural replacement cycle.  People die and new generations of people replace them and their roles.  Successful investors should recognize this pattern, be thankful for what they have and realize at some point, it’s someone else’s turn to take over.
No one says you have to remain invested.  That’s just one of many false aphorisms we’ve been fed.
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Tradestream Radio #2: hedge fund replication, insider trading, more

tradestream radio, discussing investing and technology

This week’s episode of Tradestreaming Radio is up and ready for listen. Let me know what you think and if you have ideas for future shows. You can listen below, find the transcript below or download directly to you iPod/iPhone via iTunes — search for Tradestream or go here.

This episode includes

  • the huge insider trading probe into many of the largest US hedge funds
  • research networks (expert networks) and how they play a role in the investing process
  • interview with hedge fund replication research provider, AlphaClone CEO and founder
  • Ivory Tower Report: Smart investors think like economists (is that a good thing?)
  • Trend Watch: Seeking Alpha continues to grow and introduces its own investing app store

Transcript Continue reading “Tradestream Radio #2: hedge fund replication, insider trading, more”

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Blowing up the fine print in financial product marketing

As a user of various financial products over the years, I sometimes wonder what it is I actually own (most of the time this occurs sometime after hitting some single malt before bed and sometime before day break).  I dunno — I read the labels on food that I ingest.  Just thought it might be interesting to know what’s in the mutual fund into which I invested all my life’s savings.  Just for kicks, you know?

So, I decided to do a little sleuth work and *pull back the covers* on the disclaimer language on some of the most widely held financial products.  What I found written in Arial font size 6 might be a little surprising to owners of mutual funds and ETFs:

Of course, past results are not at all, in any way, form, or fashion indicative of future performance.  No way and it doesn’t even matter that we have to say that.  We probably would anyway just to cover our own asses.  Anyway, in terms of performance, it’s really just a crapshoot.  Who wrote that Random Walk thingie again?  We’re not big fans of him (he’s probably an academic).  We don’t love Bogle either — he’s the one who tried to force us into buy and hold strategies.  Cramer’s more our speed, if you care.  We sell/market financial products that trade in a secondary market so we don’t really care all that much anyway how they perform.  As long as we grow our assets under management and provide liquidity to the products.  In fact, we’re not quite sure what to make of all the blogger research that shows that our ETFs don’t come close to tracking the indices they’re supposed to follow.  And those leveraged ones — the 2x, 3x, 4x, XXXs — who really understands how all those things work?  I mean, can you really use daily future rebalancing as part of a core strategy anyway??  Thankfully for us, it’s products like these that enable us to raise our management fees in an environment that continuously pushes fees down.  We had it good with mutual funds — whose stupid idea was to transition to lower-fee ETFs? By the way, if you really want performance, why not try just giving your money to one of those fancy hedge fund vehicles?  They seem to know what they’re doing, right?  Man, I’d like to be in their shoes.  Me?  I’d be David Tepper or maybe  Bill Ackman.  Yeah, Ackman.  With his build and that gray heirhair, he’s totally a baller investor. Also, you should know, that we don’t really believe all that new-fangled behavioral research that shows that for investors, our products are sort of like drugs in the hands of addicts.  In essence, there’s no way these people are going to make money in the market anyway.  So, why not provide a vehicle that purports to do as much.  Is that so bad?  Is it?

Wow, who knew what was written in all that small print?

photo courtesy of somegeekintn
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NYTimes: Insider trading still good indicator for stocks

As a follow-up to The Anti-Galleon Model: 4 resources to insider trade — legally, I just wanted to comment on a NY Times article today by Mark Hulbert called More often than not, the insiders get it right.  The article tracks how insider selling tracked during the downturn in late 2008 and how insider buying accompanied the pickup in 2009.

Couple of things here:

  • Insider selling abated somewhat during a tough January 2010, leading to what some auger as merely a small pullback in the market
  • While typically pretty accurate, insiders “failed to recognize the top of the bull market in October 2007, and didn’t anticipate the depth of the decline that followed.” (according to Hulbert)
  • According to Prof. Seyhun, the axe on insider trading, insiders have been correct far more often than they’ve been wrong, and this is still likely to be the case.

I like aggregate insider buying/selling activity to help forecast market movements but I think it’s even more useful when looking at individual securities.  My gut tells me that seeing the CFO buy shares hand over fist in a small-cap company is more useful that knowing the sell-buy ratio, as computed by Vickers, is 3.51.