Alternative Market Briefing

Pfaeffikon talking (1): Skybridge on hedge fund investing in uncertain times

Monday, October 01, 2012

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Max von Bismarck Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

Max von Bismarck, partner and CEO (Europe) of Skybridge Capital, a fund of hedge fund house headquarted in New York with around $6.5bn in AuM, moved to the firm’s new Zurich offices a couple of months ago. He said during an IIR conference in Pfaeffikon, a town near Zurich, last week that the period of "great moderation" is clearly over.

Indeed, the apparent decline in volatility in the early 2000s that coincided with the Fed Chairmanship of Alan Greenspan became known as The Great Moderation. The world has moved from being uni or bi-polar to now being a multi-polar world, that is, slightly more unstable, he said. With the internet and social media, the world is also hyper-connected and interdependent, which is empowering and disempowering at the same time (the latter because we see the world situations that we have little control over). The bell’s curve belly is no longer flat, it has got thinner and the tails have gotten fatter. That’s not so bad for hedge funds which have tools to deal with that, he noted, it’s just more complicated to handle.

The typical trading model for funds of hedge funds (FoHF) involves investing with diversification as a focus; they diversify across all several strategies, adopt an all-weath......................

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