Alternative Market Briefing

Paper claims alternative beta outperforms equities and hedge funds

Monday, December 03, 2012

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Laurent Favre Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

The alpha vs. beta debate is never over. It separates those in the asset management industry who believe market beta is cheaper and more profitable as alpha is scarce, and those who try to focus on capturing alpha.

This is pushing pertinent research, the latest of which comes from quantitative analyst Dr. Krishna Nehra and partner/CEO Laurent Favre of AlternativeSoft, an investment software solutions provider based in London, who have just published a paper called "Quick & Easy Investing - the Alternative Beta Approach Revisited".

An increasing number of investors are migrating away from active products towards passive ones such as exchange traded funds (ETFs) and other index-tracking funds, they claim. This is because the latter can provide beta returns similar to many traditional active managers, but at lower cost.

(The excess return of a fund or portfolio relative to the return of a benchmark index or to what would be predicted by an equilibrium model is alpha - something hedge funds and active managers claim to capture. Whereas beta is a measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of......................

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