Hedge funds
Another guest postThe folks over at Valleywag are having fun with a Craigslist posting for a hedge fund job. In addition to looking for someone with all the typical quant skills, the ad asks applicants to do the following 1)...
The N.Y. Times is making much today about a new Alpha magazine article on salaries of managers at top hedge funds, but I'm uneasy. While there are hedge fund folks who are (very) highly paid, the idea that the 1/20...
Great Bloomberg Markets article on the (usually) secretive Ken Griffin, founder of Chicago-based Citadel Investment Corp., among the most successful hedge funds on the planet:Citadel employs 72 Ph.D.s, including former mathematics professors and astrophysicists. They’re the heart of the firm’s...
There is must-read piece in the NY Times this weekend on the hedge fund "bubble". Whether you are a bubble believer or not, the growth in assets in said category from $40-billion to $1-trillion in fifteen years is cause enough...
The average price paid for search keywords dropped 3% in January. Leading the way down were telecom/wireless-related keywords, which were off 28%, according to researcher Fathom Online. While this was mostly seasonal and therefore predictable, somewhat more interesting was the...
Burton "Random Walk" Malkiel is getting himself into a tussle these days, as reported by today's WSJ. He has a working paper out where he argues that current hedge fund indices overstate performance considerably:...we examine the claims of the managers...
The FT has a piece today that quietly dissects some of the inherent problems in imputing high performance to hedge funds. While there is ample reason to believe that lifting the short-selling contraint can improve portfolio performance, there is also...
There is a nifty paper in the October issue of the Journal of Finance arguing that hedge funds, contrary to orthodox efficient market theory, rode the technology bubble of the late 1990s rather than trading against said overpriced stocks. What's...
You have to give Carl Icahn credit: He is making the most of the current ardor for hedge funds. The combative financier is apparently raising a hedge fund, but his won't be any run-of-the-mill thing. Instead, he is raising $3-billion...
Troubles at Andor Capital have been known for some time, and many have been gaming the company's positions. The guess has been that the firm's partners would split, and given the company's poor show in recent years, that would mean...
Two tidbits from an interesting Edhec study cited in the Financial Times today: "...nine out of 13 hedge fund strategies lost money in May, just as they did in April." "According to Mercer Investment Consulting, the correlation of the CSFB/Tremont...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
Sad to say, but many hedge fund managers are illiterate dolts. They are wealthy, illiterate dolts, so there are compensatory attributes, but they're still nasty sorts to be stuck with at a party. That is why it is nice to...
