Salient to Investors: Tony James at Blackstone said hedge funds are a way to play the stock market with lower volatility and lower returns – shoot-the-lights-out returns are best left to private equity and real estate. Neil Chriss at Hutchin Hill Capital said Calpers’ hedge-fund allocation was not big enough to
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Teacher Retirement System of Texas cut its hedge fund allocation to 8% from 9%, cut equities by 4 percentage points and fixed-income by 2 percentage points, and increased risk parity – a strategy based on allocation of risk and private equity and real assets – and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Few businesses are large enough to merit Warren Buffett’s attention. Berkshire Hathaway spent a third of the total from a year earlier on equities in half1 2014, while sales of stock more than doubled. Buffett dislikes paying a dividend and rarely buys back shares. David Rolfe at Wedgewood Partners said Buffett’s list
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: There are more than 400 liquid alternative, hedge-fund-like strategies offered in a mutual fund wrapper, up from a few dozen prior to the financial crisis. Many observers think it unlikely that equity returns will continue to be as robust as the last 5 years, while bonds face
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The NACUBO and the Commonfund Institute said US college endowments allocated 47 percent of their investment portfolios to alternative assets in the year ended in June, versus 54 percent the prior year. NACUBO-Commonfund said colleges earned an average endowment investment return of 11.7 percent in the year
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Private-equity firms, hedge funds and REITs have bought more than 100,000 US homes, becoming dominant single-family landlords in markets hardest-hit by the housing crash such as Atlanta. Christopher Thornberg at Beacon Economics said investors that are building home-rental companies may not want to take on the red tape, stigma of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Private-equity managers from Fortress Investment to Blackstone say now is the time to exit investments as stocks rally and interest rates start to rise. Wesley Edens at Fortress said he is preparing holdings for public offerings while struggling to find attractive new deals. Pete Briger at Fortress said the environment extends
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Hamilton “Tony” James of Blackstone Group said stocks were a fool’s game compared with alternative investments. and investing in alternatives makes sense even when they underperform. James said the return from these idiosyncratic investments are very uncorrelated to the broader markets, so portfolio volatility falls. Hedge funds have been
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: New York City’s retirement system is the only one of the 11 biggest US public-worker pensions that refuses to manage any assets internally. The typical fees for hedge funds and private-equity and real-estate firms is 2 percent of assets plus 20 percent of profits. Last year, three city pension funds
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Calpers market value exceeds the high set before the global financial crisis wiped out more than a third of its wealth, but is is still short $87 billion, or 26 percent, of meeting its long-term commitments. Calpers has half of its money in equities, and returned 13 percent
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