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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused investors around the globe to ditch risky assets in favor of safer alternatives. Many have looked to gold as the place to park capital in hopes that the commodity will gain value during the current market rout. Gold is viewed as a safe haven, expected to deliver a degree of protection when equity markets become more...

The Alternatives Landscape provides a broad overview of the current environment for the primary alternative asset classes: hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real assets, and real estate. The landscape begins with a look at the broad hedge fund universe, which saw managers in higher beta-oriented strategies generating the best returns.

In what feels like a distant memory, the first quarter of 2020 began on a positive note, with the S&P 500 rising to a record high on February 19. Markets quickly retreated as investors digested the impact of COVID-19 on the global economy. The S&P 500 plummeted, losing 34% in 23 trading days, the fastest decline of that magnitude in history...

Liquidity risk is a critical issue for investors, and it has been heightened in the COVID-19 environment that has brought on the end of the bull market. We take a closer review of the factors that have changed market liquidity conditions over the past decade, how the “new liquidity reality” has impacted several markets during the recent...

The unprecedented speed, intensity, and uncertainty of COVID-19 has created a host of new and complex challenges for wealthy families that are playing out across both financial and family dynamics. There's no doubt it is a financial and business challenge, but it is also a very human one. To assist family office leaders and the families they su...

April is setting up to be a transformational month for understanding how the global economy and financial markets will recover from the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world. Investor’s patience are being tested, and low prices may tempt some investors to rush into equities. But are there still too many unknowns?

Predicting the future path of inflation is notoriously difficult; just ask any economist. The best protection against future uncertainty is a well-constructed portfolio, tailored to meet the asset owner’s risk tolerance, portfolio objectives, and spending needs. While there are trade-offs associated with all solutions to protect a portfolio a...

Born out of the hard lessons learned from early 20th-century market crashes and the First World War, the concept of a diversified investment fund was formalized under the Securities Act of 1933 and Investment Company Act of 1940. Three types of funds were created, including the closed-end funds (CEFs). It can be psychologically difficult to stay in...

Taxable investors are right to be concerned with measuring performance on an after-tax basis. However, to put after-tax performance in perspective requires a benchmark, just as pretax performance measurement does. Yet unlike pretax performance, after-tax performance is unique to each investor’s tax situation and asset flow patterns.

Tax alpha is a measurement of tax efficiency that attempts to isolate the value of active tax management by comparing a manager versus a passive benchmark. This metric is preferred over alternative measures of tax efficiency because it shows the investor’s actual tax experience and uses a custom benchmark to put the results in perspective. Th...

With unprecedented health concerns and economic uncertainty at the forefront of everyone’s mind, Edward Marshall sat down with Richard Perez, to provide guidance on how to put these events into perspective. Edward shared tactics on how to weather environments like those we are experiencing such as:Putting uncertainty and market volatilit...

While little liquidity is making its way into the real economy, it is flowing into capital markets, leading to distorted prices and increasing risks to investors. Unfortunately, the longer accommodative central bank policies remain in place, the higher asset prices are likely to climb and the more investors will face an increasing risk of loss.

Many, if not most, consumers of water are not aware of the inevitability of shortages, do not notice the impact of pollution on supplies and are oblivious to the fact that future prices will be dramatically influenced by these and other factors. Yet, there are realists who are well aware of their water footprint and are intent on making changes.

This paper examines how good active managers and hedge funds need to be to outperform passive index funds on an after-tax basis using over 40 years of data. The authors note that while many studies look at the impact of fees on active manager performance they are not aware of any studies that incorporate the impact of taxes over long periods o...

The word concentrated is defined as “to direct toward one point” or “to intensify.” For wealth preservation, that’s not necessarily a good strategy. Here’s what individuals need to know about concentrated holdings and whether they should sell, hedge, exchange, donate or transfer.