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We are launching Friday Only Club!

Oscar de la Renta chose not to show at New York Fashion Week and instead streamed on Amazon. Is Amazon a suitable forum for a luxury brand? CEO Alex Bolen said, "I'm not sure. But we have to experiment with new ways to get our story out." https://lnkd.in/g4rZMxyb We launched our funds when Covid started and with the halt in travel and tough fund raising environment for emerging managers, we focused on performance and experimented with new ways to reach out to allocators, namely Linkedin posts and YouTube videos which can now be binge-watched on  www.quantflix.com . True, some people say that with the positive fund returns last year for both our long-only equity and multi-strategy funds, and the China fund outperforming its benchmark by its annualized double-digit aim, it was expected that we would pass the $100m mark. But when times are bad, most new investment monies went to well-known funds that are much bigger with a marketing budget that we cannot afford. So every lit...
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Sustainability of high returns

I look out of the window and see that it has started to rain. I search for one of those free-gift umbrellas from conferences that's probably a couple of years old pre-covid (since everyone else in the office took the good brollies). Argh, the rubble grip handle is sticky. Will I get poisoned just by touching this? (Imagine the headlines "Hedge Fund Manager dies from using freebie umbrella")

Why does the rubber become sticky? According to Quora, this is not rubber, but plastic softened with plasticizer. Over time, the plasticizer 'floats' up to the surface and becomes this sticky residue which renders the entire umbrella unusable because I don't want to grip a sticky handle. But in the spirit of ESG and not create more waste, I found a quick solution by wiping the handle with Purell hand sanitizer.

Some clients ask why the long-short absolute return funds they are invested in have fallen 20-30% or more in tandem with indices? Maybe it's because they are not really designed to produce absolute returns. Perhaps they have very little short exposure, and have high net long exposures 50-100%. The 'plasticizer' these funds used to generate high returns was leverage, which has become untenable with rising borrowing costs.

The 'Purell sanitizer' solution for these funds has been to drastically cut gross and net exposure. But really this is just a temporary fix to stop the bleeding but not generate outperformance once again. The umbrella handle will become sticky after some time as the remaining plasticizer chemicals surface to the top.

You only realize the umbrella doesn't function the way you expected when you need it the most.

#hedgefund #leverage #umbrella #esg




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We are launching Friday Only Club!

Oscar de la Renta chose not to show at New York Fashion Week and instead streamed on Amazon. Is Amazon a suitable forum for a luxury brand? CEO Alex Bolen said, "I'm not sure. But we have to experiment with new ways to get our story out." https://lnkd.in/g4rZMxyb We launched our funds when Covid started and with the halt in travel and tough fund raising environment for emerging managers, we focused on performance and experimented with new ways to reach out to allocators, namely Linkedin posts and YouTube videos which can now be binge-watched on  www.quantflix.com . True, some people say that with the positive fund returns last year for both our long-only equity and multi-strategy funds, and the China fund outperforming its benchmark by its annualized double-digit aim, it was expected that we would pass the $100m mark. But when times are bad, most new investment monies went to well-known funds that are much bigger with a marketing budget that we cannot afford. So every lit...
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The First Edition of Friday Only Club!

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