As part of what I do as manager of a Global currency-only multi-strategy fund, I go to conferences. It's very rare to come across revolutionary ideas, and conferences are most likely not the place where one may experience the exception to that rule. If you are familiar with the movie "Margin Call," it's more, like Jeremy Irons puts it, about trying to hear the music (or lack of) that will lead the market over the next few months. But sometimes I hear comments worth writing down, and this is what happened at a recent event in New York. I thought I'd share some of them with you. I apologize in advance for the synthetic style, but I wanted to cut right to the chase.

The Fed vs. the ECB, and their view of the crisis

The most interesting part here is not what the Fed and the ECB say: we

Is foreign exchange an asset class in its own right? This question is certainly not new, yet it hasn’t been answered once and for all.

One of the reasons why FX, or forex, or currency trading (whatever we want to call it), is difficult to categorize is because of the lack of an appropriate benchmark.

When we evaluate the performance of an equity fund, the first piece of information we see is the comparison of its returns with the ones of the S&P, MSCI, or whatever index may be relevant. (This may or may not make sense, since it tends to make a program look good when it loses “only” 20% vis-à-vis a drop in the S&P of 30%: The reality is still that the fund lost money in absolute terms and at the end of the day, that’s all it matters. But this is another story.)

FX programs, on

In my opinion, amid the enthusiasm that followed the announcement of a possible bailout, some have lost sight of the bigger picture.

The numbers: 700 billion. Why? Is it enough? Is it too much? Nobody really knows, because in the credit market most positions are traded over the counter. Some are even kept off balance sheet. Unless all banks fully open their books, it will remain a guessing game and a dangerous gamble. The government committed to fix a problem without really knowing its full extent, also because they seem to forget that this is not just a US issue: a significant portion of IRSs, CDOs, CBOs and so forth, are traded cross border. The administration is asking Congress for a blank check with no real plan. Maybe Congress should ask them what they exactly want to do with that sum, and then decide. At the moment, it looks like

In this article I would like to cover two points about the outlook for agricultural commodities:

1. The role of agricultural commodities prices in the current food price inflation environment
2. Some projections about the impact of climate changes on agriculture over the next ten years.

There has been a lot of talk, and many words have been written about soaring commodity market prices. It appears that the best instruments to participate in such markets are ETFs and ETNs. Some of them target one specific sector, like DB Multi-Sector Commodity Master Trust (DBA) for agricultural commodities (25% each of wheat, corn, soybeans, and sugar), while others offer exposure to a basket of sectors, like iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Indexed (GSC), that includes energy, industrial metals, agriculture, livestock and precious metals.

Three articles on this site are in my opinion particularly interesting and well written: “Commodity ETF Overview”, by Tim Iacono,