Managed Futures and alternatives have been getting a bad rap over the past couple of years, and we’ve spent far too much time “setting the record straight.” We thought it might be a good idea to highlight a major publication (The Wall Street Journal) for doing a decent job capturing the climate of “commodity hedge funds” this summer. What are we talking about?
Category: Education
05
Sep
2014
The Top 37 Posts Ranked by Readers this Summer
This week is a significant week for many: the end of summer, the end of vacation, beginning of a new school year, the start of the NFL season (Go Bears!), and a possible move in the markets. But between all your summer plans, you might have elected to turn off those phones, tablets, fancy gadgets, […]
23
Jun
2014
Lessons Learned From 37 Years of Futures Trading
Managed Futures have come a long way in the past 37 years, and so has Barbara Mueller, who will be retiring at the end of March after nearly four decades dealing with futures trading. Barbara has been working in the industry since 1973, and has been an invaluable asset to Attain Capital since 2006.
In honor of her retirement, we’re taking a break from our traditional analysis this week to pay tribute to Ms. Mueller. It has been an honor to work with someone as knowledgeable, talented and motivated as Barbara, and here she provides us with her (often comical) insight from 37 years of experience in the world of futures trading.
20
May
2014
Why Hedge Funds Don’t Care if They’re Underperforming the S&P
So the next time there’s an article claiming Hedge Funds (or other Alternative Investments) as underperforming the S&P 500, realize they are telling you that the Filet tastes meatier than the Salmon. The Salmon is half the calories and half the fat content… if it doesn’t taste as meaty – that’s usually on purpose.
28
Apr
2014
Energy Markets vs. Energy Companies
Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the energy sector has been going down for most of the past 5 years from looking at the charts above – but those charts depict relative performance. The energy sector (via the ETF $XLE) has actually done quite well since the 2009 lows, see here:
15
Apr
2014
Futures Trading on Tax Day
For those of you who traded futures markets, this is one hurdle you don’t have to jump over. Here’s some tax advantages of futures trading.
07
Apr
2014
Get your Comments in (CTA/CPO Capital Requirements)
We won’t bore you with our full response, which is likely a little too much ‘inside baseball’ for most. But here’s some questions to ponder before writing up your comments (and please do, CPO’s/CTA’s).
31
Mar
2014
What a Hedge Fund Failure Looks like:
The mainstream financial press couldn’t get enough of the news today/yesterday that hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones was shutting down one of his eponymous funds, the Tudor Tensor Fund (try saying Tudor Tensor ten times fast). Here’s a snapshot of some of the twitter comments:
24
Mar
2014
7 Commodities in Contango and Backwardation
One of the more unique aspects of futures contracts compared to other investment styles, is that there are fixed term contracts which expire at specific dates, and many different ‘contract months’ for each commodity futures market. Charting these different prices for the different contract months gives you what they call the price “curve” of either backwardation or contango.
19
Mar
2014
Will Simple Beat Complex in the Next 5 Years?
One of our favorite bloggers almost made us cry yesterday… It’s Barry Ritholtz, who grabbed the charts out of our own post on various markets movements and asset classes both before and after March 9th, 2009 (the equity low), and used them to kick managed futures while their down — claiming Cheap and Simple (stock) beats (present tense) Expensive and Complex (managed futures).
