Robert Koenigsberger isn’t rattled by uncertainty, at least when it comes to markets. He’s had a lot of practice, starting his career in the 1980s when emerging markets were essentially a collection of bank loans in default. He founded Gramercy, the emerging markets alternatives firm, in 1998 when Russia devalued its currency and forced the restructuring of the country’s debt.

In recent weeks, investors have gotten rattled by a potential slowdown in corporate spending on AI, but that is unlikely to put much of a dent in the boom in AI capital spending. The race is on.

More than a decade ago, I wrote a story called "Is Alpha Dead?" The premise was simple: Markets had become so competitive, so efficient, and so crowded that generating excess returns was getting harder and harder.Andre Perold, CIO of HighVista Strategies, was one of the people I interviewed for that piece. So I was curious how he thinks about the question today.

In episode 18, I speak with Stuart Fiertz, co-founder and president of Cheyne Capital. Our conversation comes at an important time for private credit as individuals flood retail-oriented funds with redemption requests and as institutions become more cautious about new investments. With the spotlight on private credit, managers are tightening their standards, raising lending rates, and offering fewer goodies to borrowers, such as allowing them to defer interest payments.

Technology hedge funds just had their strongest month in 26 years.But that return was almost a perfect match with the S&P 500’s performance.

Barings wasn’t just looking for capital — it was looking for a partner that fit its model.Mike Freno, chairman and CEO of Barings, says asset managers now need capital to keep growing — to seed funds, make acquisitions, and compete in a business where fees keep getting squeezed.

Nick Liolis came to an uncomfortable conclusion after taking over Guardian Life’s investment portfolio. Even with roughly $85 billion in assets, the insurer was losing ground.As asset managers consolidated, Liolis believed Guardian faced a choice. It could continue trying to build a traditional in-house investment organization, competing for talent and directly originated deals against much larger firms. Or it could rethink the model, particularly as scale in asset management began to move beyon

When Jonathan Grabel, the CIO of Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association since 2017, was bringing the management of co-investments in-house, he had part of his team travel to meet with private equity firms, institutional investors, and investment banks to learn about their approaches to internal investment committees, including voting on decisions.

The sharp reversal in global equity markets in April posed a familiar challenge for quantitative hedge funds as markets did a flip from crisis mode to a more optimistic view faster than most models are designed to adapt.The PivotalPath Equity Quant Index rose 0.9 percent last month. While that performance was a tiny fraction of the gains for directional equity strategies, the fact that quants finished the month in positive territory was a good signal of the funds' resilience.

Biotech doesn’t typically fail in the lab. It fails later — after early promise and before approval — when the cost of proving a drug works comes up against a funding system built for an earlier stage.

The problem with “semi-liquid” funds might start with the name. When I spoke to Luke Sarsfield of alternative investment firm Ridgepost Capital, he made a simple point: people hear “semi-liquid”… and miss the “semi.” They just hear “liquid.”That’s a fun quote, but it does point to something more structural.For investors, managers, and allocators, it raises a basic question: who controls liquidity when very different investors share the same pool of capital?

Investors piled into private credit over the past decade for higher yields – and for the stability that fixed income was always intended to provide during downturns.But some of those credit investments now come with a different set of assumptions: that growth will continue, that these companies won’t be disrupted by changes like AI, that capital markets will stay open, and that managers can easily get out of their investments. That sounds like a stock. And in many cases, it behaves like one too.

Institutional investors have long used exchange-traded funds as a stopgap — equitizing cash or maintaining market exposure while shifting assets between managers.Increasingly, ETFs are doing more than that. Across pensions and endowments, they are being used to replace in-house indexing teams, counterbalance active managers, and provide access to markets that once required dedicated mandates or complex operational setups.

Until recently, investors believed AI would force companies to rethink their business models, fuel productivity growth — and ultimately push inflation lower.That’s all changed, at least for the time being, according to BlackRock’s Spring 2026 hedge fund outlook released today.

Hedge funds have had a quite a streak in delivering on their promises to investors in recent years, but they’re not invincible.Few strategies have emerged unscathed after the Iran war and the skyrocketing price of oil sent markets reeling last month. Both the Nasdaq and the Dow Industrials fell into correction territory and all sectors of the S&P 500 fell, except energy. Treasurys also dropped right along with stocks. Traders with bets that interest rates would fall were stymied by the prospect

After years in which many large institutions channeled their focus and resources into private markets, investors are taking a harder look at the stocks, bonds, and other public securities that still make up the bulk of their portfolios. Some institutional investors, in revisiting their public market exposures, are finding that broad index strategies come with structural frictions — from reconstitution effects to hidden cash positions — that can materially shape returns.

The debate over who should own America’s houses has moved to Washington.Sean Dobson has spent nearly four decades studying housing finance — from the rise of mortgage-backed securities to the collapse of the housing market and the emergence of institutional single-family rentals after the financial crisis.Now the Amherst Group CEO finds himself defending the business he helped build.

With war raging in the Middle East and the price of oil rising to just below $100 a barrel, institutional investors are asking which hedge fund strategies are best positioned to weather energy-driven market shocks. On Monday, oil surged to $120 a barrel, before the G7 announced an emergency meeting to discuss options to keep prices in check, including releasing supply from strategic reserves. An analysis from hedge fund research firm PivotalPath shows that when oil prices spike, managed futures

When I met Soraya Chabarek in New York after a few calls on Zoom, we immediately dove into talking about first jobs, cherished mentors, being a woman in finance, and how the arc of her career feels logical and planned — well, at least in retrospect. Connecting with people runs through this conversation with Soraya, who believes technology can accelerate access, but real human relationships ultimately hold investment firms together.

Investments that are expected to buffer portfolios when markets are dropping are acting very similarly to stocks, a potentially dangerous market alarm bell.