Category: Managed Futures

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09 Feb 2012

Buyer Beware – Know Who Holds Your Money

Managed Futures

Navigating the waters of sophisticated investments can be difficult, to say the least. Unless your background is in finance, the terminology alone can be overwhelming. Of course, it doesn’t help when terminology is misappropriated (like Wisdom Tree calling its ETF “managed futures”), or when people who know little to nothing are able to sound like they do by relying on seemingly seamless use of jargon to boost their credibility.

Case in point: the lovely (heavy sarcasm) stock broker (we think) who was next to one of our associates on a flight from Chicago to New York this morning, doling out advice to some finance newbies. He was regaling them with stories of how to make money, and his “market” advice, without any kind of reasons or numbers provided to support his “wise” direction…

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09 Feb 2012

A Mostly Intelligent Managed Futures Rebuff

Managed Futures

In the beginning of a new year, it’s common to see personalities from across the financial world chiming in as to what asset classes you should be investing in as you modify and tweak your personal portfolio, so it wasn’t all that surprising to see a piece up over at RegisteredRep.com addressing managed futures. After all, with asset flows continuing into the space, understanding how, why and if you should invest in managed futures is important. To be entirely fair, we’ll give the author props for addressing the opportunity in a more intelligent manner than most. Let’s break it down…

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07 Feb 2012

Attain Capital’s Semi-Annual CTA Rankings

Managed Futures

It’s that time of year again, when we have the data for all of the CTAs we track through the end of 2011, allowing us to try and answer the question we get on a daily basis: What’s your BEST managed futures program? That question is always a tricky one, as depending on who is asking it, they may want to know any one of several variations on who is best. Best last year? Best for all time? Best risk adjusted return? Best in terms of lowest drawdowns?

This time around, we’re mixing things up- with an exciting new ranking algorithm, and a breakdown designed to be more useful to investors attempting to gain insight into the industry.

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03 Feb 2012

More from the TDAmeritrade Conference in Orlando…

Managed Futures

Dr. Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania addressed attendees, with a heavy focus on the state of the bond markets worldwide in light of target inflation rates and an extension of the zero bound rate environment announced by the Fed. We’ve covered the Fed’s actions on the blog previously, but Dr. Siegel’s personification of an avid bond investor, particularly in TIPS, not only got a round of laughter from the audience, but was spot on.

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01 Feb 2012

Managed Futures Finish January Down -0.30%

Managed Futures

Every month, we kick off by providing an estimate of CTA performance from the previous month, based on preliminary data from the Newedge CTA Index, Credit Suisse Dow Jones Core Managed Futures Index, and the performance of the CTAs we track here at Attain. The books are officially closed on the first month of 2012, and the performance we saw in managed futures was pretty lackluster. We are estimating managed futures as an asset class finished January down -0.30%. What, exactly, contributed to this performance?

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31 Jan 2012

What to Do If You’re Making Money

Managed Futures

While we commonly talk in this space about what to do when staring losses in the face, less time is spent here and elsewhere talking about what to do when you have had success with a program. Perhaps this is something to do with the human condition and focusing on that which causes us pain before considering that which brings us pleasure, or perhaps it is just a simple case of most investors thinking the upside is easy to manage when compared to the downside.

Whatever the case, there have been some questions from Attain clients recently asking what they should do with gains in some programs, and, specifically, what their options are for scaling up the trading of the successful programs in their portfolios. Our take on it?

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24 Jan 2012

Managed Futures 2012 Outlook / 2011 Review

Managed Futures

You’ve gotten it from everywhere else- the hot shot managers, institutional titans and talking heads on CNBC have all weighed in on where they think 2012 will take investors. Now, it’s our turn in what has become our most read newsletter – the annual Attain Capital look back/peer forward – the 2012 Managed Futures Outlook […]

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23 Jan 2012

The Manager Selection Conundrum Solution

Macro Commentary…

Barry Ritholtz recently posed an interesting question to a group of family offices during a presentation he made: “Who is good at picking Hedge fund managers? Who amongst you has the ability to consistently evaluate managers who then outperform over time?” In light of 2011’s subpar performance across the hedge fund universe (and in managed […]

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29 Dec 2011

Putting Numbers to the (Smiley) Faces

Managed Futures

We always enjoy when Barry Ritholtz, one of our favorite market/economy bloggers, puts out his collection of market sentiment charts, as he did last week. Our favorite is the simplistic one below with the cute faces. We actually put numbers to this chart in a newsletter a while back, showing how getting in at the […]

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