Chidem Kurdas
Most of the money going into commodities goes to index investments. These suffer from a perennial problem regardless of what’s happening in markets for commodities, known as the negative roll yield. Investors can lose money even when the basket of commodities the index represents gain value. Commodity hedge fund people will tell you that to escape this horror you should give the money to them – for a higher fee, of course – instead of putting it on an index. (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
The exchange-traded fund most used by hedge funds and other traders tracks a broad-based (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
The idea of combining index investments with skilled (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
The institutional manager Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo has a distinctive view on gold. Unlike most observers and gold buyers like John Paulson (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
In January John Paulson started to climb out of the deep pool of red ink he got into last year but in February he went the wrong way, in part because gold prices declined. Despite (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
A year or so ago there was an unconfirmed report than John Paulson was looking to (more…)
Funds of funds are using exchange-traded products to fill the gaps in their portfolios. (more…)
Chidem Kurdas
The first time I interviewed Tim Pickering almost two years ago, he managed the Claymore Natural Gas Fund trading on the Toronto stock exchange in addition to the Auspice diversified managed futures program. Earlier this month I interviewed him again for Opalesque Futures Intelligence, a publication I edit.
Tim has been busy. He’s developed a third-generation commodity index, the basis of another Claymore ETF on the TMX, and a managed futures index, with a corresponding ETF in the pipeline. A third-generation commodity index aims to get the upside of commodity returns while avoiding some of the downside. It’s meant to be a better way to get commodity exposure. But what does a managed futures index do? I asked Tim that question. (more…)
Paulson & Co.’s $4.4 billion holding in SPDR Gold Trust may be the single largest investment in an exchange-traded fund. But many hedge funds as well as institutions hold a wide variety of ETFs either as a hedge or an inexpensive way of gaining from the rise of a chosen market. (more…)
