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Why are some investors risk takers and others are not? Is risk-taking something that can be taught or is it innate? Risk-taking – is it nature or nurture?

There has been a litany of stories on yield curve flatness as if this is the signal that will provide the investment secret to success for 2018. Investors should watch the yield curve closely, but it is important to focus on what it is and is not signaling. There is a cost with trying to be preemptive to what is being signaled in the yield curve.

This is the second in our series; all you need to know about a topic should fit on a “3 by 5” index card. We think the complexity of hedge fund investing can be simplified if the simple dichotomy of divergent and convergent trading is used as a primary method of describing potential return pay-offs.

Static investments in long-only commodity indices have had a checkered past since the financial crisis. With the end of the commodity super-cycle, there has been a long commodity unwind and passive investing in commodities has provided negative annualized returns for investors for years. There has not been any bounce to pre-crisis level like we seen in equities. The interest in commodities as an inflation hedge has waned with this poor performance.

There has been a consistent drumbeat that investors should use hedge funds as a core means of portfolio diversification. This has been at the expense of other methods of hedging. A diversification strategy makes sense when there is no investor information advantage or no view on the direction of markets, but in reality, investors often have some view on market direction or risks at the extreme. However, given the uncertainty on market direction and the inability to form conditional hedges, the investor focus is usually on strategy diversification through hedge funds.

Do speculators drive prices away from commodity fundamentals? This is one of the core commodity futures markets questions. One approach to answering this question is through looking at the price dynamics, but the advantage of futures is that we have reporting of position information by specific traders groups. Trade flows can be divided into producers, money managers (speculators), swaps dealers, and indexers. The relative balance between these groups can tell us about the market structure, a dynamic agent-based analysis.

Morningstar star ratings – Do they really work or are they a dangerous tool? This is important to revisit given the increased number of hedge funds that now have ’40 Act fund structures that are ranked by Morningstar.

There has been an explosion of alternative measures and methods to access market betas and risk premiums, yet it is not always easy to explain what this added complexity should give investors.  We want to simplify the discussion to a simple trade-off – added beta “complexity” through either decomposing, diversifying, or managing the set of betas should reduce the range of return to risk.

Trend-following CTAs and managed futures has evolved over the years. Many of the largest firms today would not be recognizable from those who were the largest during the 1980s and 90s. Some of this change in leadership is due to business decisions, but it also has to do with the evolution of the investment process. CTAs have evolved with research trends in finance, the changing focus of overall money management, technological developments, and structural changes in markets.

Inflation is here. There is no doubt, but that number will be around 2%. The only question that is unclear is whether there will be overshoot beyond the 2% level. Clearly inflation in the Eurozone is still not near 2%, but all inflation placed bets seem to surround the target level that have set by central banks. Investors have to ask the simple question of whether the beyond 2% is realistic.

There has been a significant capital switch from mutual fund investing to ETFs, from active to passive investing. This has been a significant positive for many investors because there are many “active” managers who are closet indexers and active managers who do not show skill.

Should investors be worried about credit spread return expectations or expectations of credit default losses in the current environment? Before we answer the credit questions about the current environment, investors may need a framework for weighting the types of risks in the credit markets. This is the fundamental question concerning holding any credit exposure, and an exhaustive research using variance decomposition of a large dataset shows that you should be worried about both. See “What Drives the Cross‐Section of Credit Spreads?: A Variance Decomposition Approach”, by Yoshiio Nozawa in the October 2017 Journal of Finance.

Managed futures index returns were slightly negative for the month with the SocGen CTA index down 26 bps and the SocGen CTA mutual fund index down 62 bps. The BTOP 50 index gained 26 bps for the month. This compared favorably against many equity indices, but was less than the fixed income indices. Trend-following managers were not able to catch the early rotations from equities to bonds during the second half of the month.