“I like Asia.  You don’t have to sell me the story but I’m going to wait until the next leg down before making any allocation”.

In the interest of full disclosure, First Avenue Partners of which I am a partner, runs a hedge fund seeding and incubation business. I generally don’t talk my own book and I don’t intend to start now, but I will speak generally about the industry without specific reference to what we do. So please read

‘Reduce beta in May and go away’ may not have quite the lyrical simplicity of the original old market adage, but may well prove to be appropriate this year.

My colleague Oliver Bergmann who heads up our hedge fund incubation business and I were discussing how the world of credit spiralled so quickly out of control. He sent me the following article by David Merkel who writes a very interesting blog called The Aleph Blog (www.alephblog.com).