CFTC chairman Gary Gensler’s testimony for the Senate Banking Committee focused on the swaps regulation debate, but his comments could be important to another high-profile controversy: the MF Global bankruptcy.
Category: Macro Commentary
21
May
2012
Financial Media Encouraging the Returns Chase?
We often chastise investors for chasing returns, but a recent article ranking hedge funds reminds us that the financial media deserves blame, too.
17
May
2012
Spain’s “Running of the Bear”
Spain’s market has set a new 9-year low, and we can’t help but wonder what this could mean for the Euro, the rest of Europe, and potentially even markets in the US.
15
May
2012
Mutual Fund Death Spiral Continues?
When Pimco launched an ETF to track its famous Total Return mutual fund, one of our favorite bloggers declared it the beginning of the end of all mutual funds. How is that prediction holding up now that the Total Return ETF has been active for a while?
14
May
2012
Guest Post: The Great Fall of China?
Jeffrey Dow Jones over at Cognitive Concord has a great post continuing the theme of politics influencing investing we witnessed last week at SALT. If China is really the potential disaster he describes, now is the time to ask whether or not your portfolio is buckled in.
11
May
2012
JPMorgan’s Gamble on Value at Risk
JPMorgan declared a staggering $2 billion loss yesterday, but we were struck by the fact that they’re still using Value at Risk, or VaR, to measure risk. We get that risk management is an inexact science, but we think they should have known better than to rely on VaR.
08
May
2012
Morningstar Mutual Fund Categorization- Really?
It’s no secret that we’re not fans of managed futures mutual funds, but even we were surprised by the answer Morningstar gave us when we asked a simple question: “What makes a managed futures mutual fund?”
04
May
2012
Market Dynamics and CTA Performance April 2012 Update
Two factors have received particular blame for making 2011 a difficult year for managed futures: the number of risk on/risk off days, and the correlation between markets. How have these forces played out so far in 2012?
02
May
2012
Asset Class Scoreboard- April 2012
April’s numbers are on the books, so it’s time to update our asset class scoreboard for the first four months of 2012. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been pretty for our favorite asset class…
02
May
2012
Long-only Commodity ETFs vs. Futures- April 2012
Time for our monthly look at how the long only commodity ETFs are performing versus simply holding the December futures contract and rolling annually. We’ve yet to receive a good answer to the question: why invest in an ETF when you can just roll December contracts annually?
