najdorf

Hedge Funds Moving Into a New Marketplace

I did some further reading at

www.indexiq.com/downlo...

It appears that the actual hedge fund index is in the unfortunate position of trailing the S&P 500 over the past 5 years. So these guys made up a new hedge fund index via backtesting...that is, they looked back in time and figured out what sort of hedge fund index would have beaten the S&P by enough to make their fund seem like a good idea. This is kind of like looking back in time to find out that investing in Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, and Microsoft would have been a good idea a long time ago, then creating a mutual fund that attempts to mimic the returns of having invested in those companies in a forward direction. Also the really high expenses and tax costs will wipe out a lot of this imaginary return. I can't believe this product exists.

Hedge Funds Moving Into a New Marketplace

The (misnamed) IQ fund should be able to lock up the market of "investors" who would like to pay 1.6% expenses to hold widely-known ETFs with expense ratios of .11% (Vanguard Bond). My head spins at how many stupid ideas I've just learned about from this one fund.

What's the value in tracking 9,000 hedge funds? I mean, maybe the top 10, 100 or 1000 have some market-beating potential, but how is it even conceivable to anyone that hedge funds 1000-9000 are going to outperform mutual funds or indexes?

How does holding a bunch of ETFs lead to tracking hedge funds? Hedge funds reveal little information about what they do with a long time lag, trade frequently, and engage in strategies you can't get with an ETF. If you could match hedge fund returns by investing in some of the most popular ETFs according to a mathematical formula, why wasn't somebody already doing this?

Let's assume that a hedge fund index is reasonable and possible. This fund isn't even doing it! They're changing weightings monthly according to some sort of ill-explained modeling.

The guy that runs this company thinks hedge funds are an asset class (quoted in linked article). He must know this isn't true. Hedge funds are a managerial strategy. The asset classes are listed right above here in the holdings - bonds, REITs, stocks, currencies, commodities, etc. These are the same things anyone invests in, usually at much lower expense levels than this fund. What matters is strategy, and this fund has one of the most dubious ones I've ever seen (unless we're talking about a strategy for managerial enrichment).