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There is difference between theory and practice. The academic research study that identifies an obvious new risk premium may be difficult or impossible to implement in practice. The good firm is able to separate theory and practice and avoid implementing bad ideas. They will have a feel for whether it can be done in practice.

Behind the backdrop of the vast changes in monetary policy over the post Financial Crisis period has been the movement to improve the regulatory environment for financial markets in order to reduce systemic risk. Significant work has been done to improve monitoring and rules to eliminate excessive speculative behavior, but as more regulations are proposed and more changes to the financial system are made, there is demising marginal benefit and a greater likelihood for unintended consequences. A rule that makes sense for one group may lead to a shift in risk capital and changes in behavior toward unregulated areas. Simply put, risky behavior will shift to the places where the cost of speculative behavior is least.

As a more quantitative focused analyst, I keep focus one thing – the numbers. Stories are good, but numbers are better. At best stories, provide context for numbers, but stories of politics will not lead to market trends. Capital flows on trends in profits, growth, liquidity, and risk. Do not suffer from “shiny object” syndrome. The news of today may not impact the important fundamental trends.

While large cap and international stocks continued to move higher, the markets are starting to see more dispersion with small cap, growth, and value indices all posting negative returns for the month. The Russell value index has fallen to negative returns for the year. A growing dispersion is also evident in sector and country returns. Bonds have been a safe asset with positive gains for the year across all sectors. The returns are consistent with slow but positive growth around the world with controlled inflation.

May was a mixed month for many trend-followers. Some did well while others got caught on the wrong side of mid-month reversals. The month saw a mid-month equity sell-off which could have stopped-out a number of key positions in equities and bonds. This sell-off was based on political uncertainty and not macro fundamentals.

Money has flowed into managed futures under anticipation that there will be a crisis event that will need the diversification benefits of trend-following strategies. These investors adjusted portfolios away from perceived overvalued assets to the value from long-short diversified trend-following. What is the sense of increasing allocations after the divergent event of a equity sell-off?

Call it the “Global Rotation”, but last month was a continuation of what we have seen for the year. There has been a flow of money into international stocks and increasing divergence between the rest of the globe and US risky assets. There is a dollar adjustment component to these returns, but there is no mistake that there is a preference for cheaper opportunities around the world.

The choice between active and passive investing has been a battle that has been raging for years, but it can be simplified through a set of easy questions. The answers to these questions are not easy, but by forming a direct set of straightforward questions with a decision tree, the issues can be discussed in […]

Investors are so used to looking at standard deviation to define risk that they forget some easy exploratory data analysis tools that can be very helpful. The boxplot focuses on a greater description of the data through a simple display of a brand array of information. The box is formed by the first and third quartiles, the whiskers are 1.5 times the interquartile range, the green diamond is the average, and the black boxes are the outliers.

There has been a preference for large managers within the managed futures space as measured by money flows, but it comes at a cost. Looking at year to date performance from the CTA Intelligence performance database shows the differences in performance based on size. What is clear is that the average performance of a set of 40 small managers is significantly higher than the performance of the largest 40 managers. Going down in size will allow clear increases in average return and with median returns; however, a closer look shows that the price of obtaining higher returns can be high in terms of regret.

With a new regulatory environment, the traditional gold market is up for grabs. While many of the changes have not been direct to the gold market but based on a broader environment, regulation is changing the market structure for trading in gold. Regulations which increase the cost of trading over-the-counter has and will push gold trading onto exchanges, centralized counterparts (CCP’s). This environmental change is the opportunity for new exchange entrants in the gold market. We have already seen new trading through ETF’s over the last few years change gold dynamics and now there is the opportunity for changes in futures trading.