Category: Alternative Investment Strategy

Market sentiment is a broad term that encompasses the prevailing feeling that investors have about a market.  Measuring this “feeling” can be accomplished in a variety of ways. CNNMoney has a Fear and Greed Index that displays this in a simple format showing when investors are most willing to take on risk or hunker down. […]

Investors are always faced with choices.  My experience tells me that these choices are often driven by simple quirks of human behavior.  Two of these that seem to be big drivers seem to be recency bias and a desire for simplification.  Both of these naturally make us poor investors. For example, in March of 2020 […]

Duncan Coker — Rivercast Capital Management — January 2020 Congratulations! If you are reading this article, you are a survivor! Granted, on some days, nothing seems to go right, but compared to the alternative, life is good. It tends to give us an optimistic outlook, as it should. Optimism is a great thing; without it, […]

Disclaimer While investment in managed futures can help enhance returns and reduce risk, it can also do just the opposite and, in fact result in further losses in a portfolio. In addition, studies conducted on managed futures as a whole may not be indicative of the performance of any individual CTA. The results of studies […]

Endowments are supposed to be the smart money, yet if you review the recent exhaustive paper on return performance, you will get a different impression. Large endowments do better than small endowments, but when you compare with a simple 60/40 stock bond balanced fund, there is not a lot of alpha generated. See “Investment Returns and […]

Few will disagree that competition through a diverse set of independent traders is good for futures markets trading. Still, this issue should be broadened to the subtle impact of general competition across firms in the economy, not just the futures markets themselves. A growing set of recent research suggests that the US is becoming less […]

Reviewing the first quarter financial performance, the dominant macro theme was the change in Fed policy actions. The same could be said about the EU—no rate increase and no solid trend for normalization. The new macro focus is on the choice of Fed governors.  More important than any policy comments or change in Fed governors […]

Is the Fed independent? Should it be independent? Has independence been an important topic in the past? More specifically, should new Fed governors be biased to economic growth, consistent with current fiscal policies over expected inflation, focus on price stability? The current discussion associated with new Fed governors is nothing new. The Fed has always fought for as much independent as possible, yet the Fed is a creature of Congress.

Bill Gross has retired and there already has been research to see if he was the Warren Buffet of bonds. His fixed income track record over the long-run cannot be easily be matched, but a careful study of his portfolio suggests that his gains were generated differently than the classic stock-picker. He may have generated alpha but he did it the old fashioned way in fixed income, he took on more sector risk. See “Bill Gross’ Alpha: The King Versus the Oracle” by Richard Dewey and Aaron Brown.

You are so intelligent. You have a great trade idea and know it will be a winner, but there is only one small problem. For any trade you make, there must be someone else on the other side. For every buyer, there has to be a seller. So, for what you are doing right, someone […]