While high yield spreads are likely to remain volatile until Europe's problems are resolved, the purge of high leveraged credits during 2008 and 2009, coupled with a lack of aggressive re-leveraging of balance sheets thereafter, should limit the severity of the next default wave absent a severe recession or systemic bank failure in Europe.
As the balance of growth shifts from developed to developing nations, the world clamors for natural resources. Land capable of satisfying that demand can help investors reduce portfolio volatility and protect principal while providing steady income or appreciation as well as a hedge against inflation.
Senior investment professionals look beyond the near term and develop five-year forecasts for economic activity and financial market instruments, including fixed income, equities, real assets and alternatives. Their work can serve as a guide to risks and thematic developments that bear watching by investors.
Producing alpha over long periods of time requires keen investment insight, leadership in exploring untapped opportunities and inefficiencies, and integrating a robust risk management process that addresses concentration, illiquidity, and transparency. This paper addresses how each of these inefficiencies may be exploited to help generate alpha.
This research report explains what private equity has to offer, answers many of the questions being asked by investors today and explains why now may be an opportune time to make a commitment to a private equity fund of funds, particularly for first-time investors.
The commercial real estate market in New York, San Francisco and Washington may have become overbought in the past year, but wealthy investors can still find attractive opportunities for capital appreciation via direct investment in second-tier markets such as Seattle, Austin and Dallas.
Goals-based wealth allocation sets forth the premise that upward mobility is unlikely without the assumption of idiosyncratic risk. And wealth mobility, as defined by keeping up with one's wealth segment, requires structuring a portfolio within three dimensions of risk: personal, market and aspirational.
The purpose of this article is to support the argument that alternative investments belong in high net worth portfolios, analyze what the appropriate allocation is for them, and summarize some of the challenges associated with actually implementing more alternatives within portfolios of different sizes.
This paper investigates the case for global investing, to examine why it is that so many American investors underweight foreign stocks, and to suggest a sensible middle ground between true global investing and the current home country bias that infects most portfolios.
Deutsche Bank research suggests that microfinance is growing in attractiveness for private sector investors. The report, entitled "Microfinance: An emerging investment opportunity," represents the first formal research paper on microfinance investments produced by a major financial institution. The study suggests that microfinance will evolve into ...
Family offices have been increasing their allocations to private equity and this trend is likely to continue, according to a new study by the European Venture Capital and Private Equity Association and the IMD Business School of Lausanne. The average allocation to private equity by the offices interviewed was 12 per cent, with the highest commitmen...
Pre-IPO investing is one of the themes in the market today. There are in London many, many firms dedicated to the sales of shares in this area. It is often said that pre-ipo investing should be avoided as anything worth buying does not need to be sold.
The authors contend that there is a better approach than the Sharpe ratio or mean variance optimization (MVO) with respect to hedge fund portfolio analysis: the Omega equation. In their view the equation that adds to mean and variance, captures all of the higher moment information in the return distribution, incorporates sensitivity to return leve...
Remain diversified within the fixed income sector, allocating assets to international and high-yield bonds where appropriate, for example, to help smooth investment performance. Opportunities exist for these sectors to perform comparatively better within the context of a rising U.S. interest rate environment.
It is interesting to note that more than 13% of equities now offer dividend yields in excess of the yield available on the average corporate bond. Could equities be a better source of income? While this is debatable, we think the discussion has merit and investors should be inclined to take more equity-like risk based on relative values.