We have a crisis in debt that started in the US housing sector, that spread to the US financial system and then to the US economy. As a result, Asian equity markets and economies have suffered far worse than the US or Europe. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? It does. And it will have some

Its going to be harder to make money. Equity long short is correlated to equity markets. Equity long short managers in aggregate tend to have chronic long biases which introduce positive correlation to equity markets. In aggregate. Particular managers, however, will have particular styles which may offer diversification and downside control. Its all in the

Whole chapters in statistics textbooks are written about correlation and we are not talking about option pricing or credit default pricing here, just simple correlation. I thought it would be illustrative to simply display a couple of charts of returns data and their corresponding correlations. Here is example 1. The blue line is a fund

As the world ponders market interventionist bail outs and mass nationalizations we risk abandoning the free market which has created the prosperity of the last 100 years. Yet even the experts, and that champion of free markets himself Alan Greenspan advocates a temporary detour from free markets to save the current situation.  The first priority

 Measure with a micrometer, mark with a chalk, cut with an axe. So much for the scientific and quantitative analysis. I am going to simply eyeball a chart and draw a straight line through it. The chart in question is the S&P500 since 1928 to Feb 2009. I have plot it on a log scale and