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Performance Measurement and Benchmarking
A comprehensive guide to evaluating absolute and relative returns, selecting the right benchmarks for alternative strategies, mitigating biases, and ensuring transparent performance reporting.
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Calculating Gross vs. Net Returns
Explore the fundamentals of calculating gross returns versus net returns in alternative investments, including the impact of various fees, performance structures, and practical considerations for accurate reporting.
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Fee Structures, Carried Interest, and Their Impact
Explore how fee models, carried interest, and incentive structures shape investor outcomes and align (or misalign) managers’ motivations in alternative investments.
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Risk-Return Profiles and Volatility Measures
An in-depth exploration of various risk and return metrics for alternative investments, covering absolute and downside measures, the importance of non-normal distributions, tail risks, and best practices for portfolio allocation decisions.
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Benchmark Selection Pitfalls
Dive into the nuanced challenges of choosing and maintaining appropriate benchmarks for alternative investment strategies, exploring float bias, bench-shopping, custom or blended indices, and more.
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Risk Decomposition and Risk-Adjusted Performance
Explore how to identify and measure individual risk factors, apply multi-factor models, and evaluate alternative investments using risk-adjusted metrics like the Sharpe, Information, and Treynor Ratios.
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Time-Weighted vs. Money-Weighted Returns
Learn about Time-Weighted and Money-Weighted Return calculations, their differences, and their uses in evaluating alternative investments.
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Factor Attribution and Style Analysis
Explore how factor attribution and style analysis help investors identify the true drivers of returns, differentiate alpha from systematic risk factors, and manage style drift in alternative investment strategies.
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Tracking Error and Style Drift
Explore how tracking error quantifies a portfolio’s deviation from its benchmark and how style drift can alter a manager’s intended strategy, with practical insights for CFA candidates and real-world investors.
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Overlay Strategies and Multi-Factor Evaluations
Discover how overlay strategies adjust or hedge specific risk exposures using derivatives and other instruments, and learn how multi-factor evaluations gauge their impact on portfolio performance.
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Volatility Targeting Techniques
Explore strategies for maintaining target volatility levels in alternative investment portfolios, covering dynamic variance scaling, correlation shifts, systematic macro, and the potential trade-offs in stabilizing returns.
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Upside vs. Downside Capture Ratios
Learn how to measure performance in both rising and falling markets using upside and downside capture ratios. Discover practical calculation methods, see real-world examples, and understand how these metrics aid in portfolio construction and analyzing manager consistency.
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Manager Universe Comparison Methods
Learn how to evaluate and compare alternative investment managers using universe-based analysis, including practical insights on peer groups, biases, quartile rankings, and mitigation strategies.
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Persistence of Returns and Survivorship Bias
Explore how returns may (or may not) persist over time in alternative investments and understand how survivorship bias can distort performance evaluations.
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Performance Simulation and Scenario Testing
Explore how to anticipate portfolio performance using scenario analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, and historical stress testing. Learn to incorporate structural breaks, validate assumptions, and interpret confidence intervals to better manage risk in alternative investments.
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Advanced Peer Group Analysis
Explore deeper segmentation by strategy type, leverage usage, and liquidity terms to evaluate alternative investments. Learn factor-based clustering, vintage year comparisons, and qualitative due diligence integration for a complete peer group perspective.