Videos

By now, you probably know what an NFT is. You have also probably heard of the staggering sums being made by individuals. More recently, several funds have launched that are approaching investing in NFTs in an institutional manner. CAIA is excited to have put together a panel of Funds to discuss the various approaches being used to invest in this emerging asset class. We reviewed the term NFT,  how NFTs are valued as well as some of the investment strategies being employed. This panel will be followed a few weeks later with a practicum on how to buy NFTs.

Diversification and digitalization are key factors in this challenging as well as shifting economy, in which African institutional investors juggle between currency restriction, language barriers and government regulation. During this webinar we speak about how to diversify investments by allocating to Alternative investments while complying to ESG standards.

Quantitative investors have long used traditional data sources, such as income statements and balance sheets of public firms, to drive stock selection models. With the explosion in the amount and diversity of data in the last five years, alternative data sources are quickly revolutionizing quantitative investing. Alternative data sources can include natural language processing of news and social media content, review of credit card transactions and consumer emails, and geolocation data using cell phone signals and satellite images.

Dan Joldzic, CEO of Alexandria Technology and Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP discussed how machines are interfacing with humans to effect manager selection and private asset secondary sales in this second installment of Turn Text to Alpha. After a quick recap of Part I (https://bit.ly/3r2k8nx), the webinar continued to discuss key questions that sit across technology and finance:

Just a few years ago, the Financial Data Professional Institute was just an idea. Now, after five exam cycles, there are FDP Charterholders in 41 countries, and the global footprint is growing. CAIA CEO Bill Kelly and Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director, Program Director, FDP Institute, discuss the curriculum, and why the FDP Institute’s highly specialized body of knowledge resonates with investment professionals.

There are many methods for conducting performance attribution with portfolios containing only liquid assets. A lack of periodic asset return data and a clear definition of what constitutes an appropriate market benchmark thwarts efforts to perform similar types of attribution analyses for portfolios of private equity funds (and other illiquid investments). This presentation covered a proposed methodology for decomposing private fund portfolio performance in an article, “Private Portfolio Attribution Analysis,” published in the Fall 2021 edition of The Journal of Alternative Investments.

There are currently over 11,000 cryptocurrencies and digital assets. With many experiencing price volatility of over 100% per year, or five times the volatility of stocks, there is substantial disagreement on how to value these assets. Some valuation models used for traditional equity valuation can be used to price these assets. Investors may also find it useful to understand business models, emerging industries, and oligopolistic models.

There are many methods for conducting performance attribution with portfolios containing only liquid assets. A lack of periodic asset return data and a clear definition of what constitutes an appropriate market benchmark thwarts efforts to perform similar types of attribution analyses for portfolios of private equity funds (and other illiquid investments). This presentation covered a proposed methodology for decomposing private fund portfolio performance in an article, “Private Portfolio Attribution Analysis,” published in the Fall 2021 edition of The Journal of Alternative Investments.

ESG is no longer a mere add-on in a portfolio or investment strategy. For an increasing number of investors in alternatives, a thoughtful approach to ESG issues has become table stakes. As the industry continues to define the role of ESG and develop approaches to measure and analyze the effect of these issues on their portfolios, industry professionals must continue to educate themselves about the key trends and developments related to ESG across alternative asset classes.

Listen in as Dan Joldzic, CEO & Quantitative Research, Alexandria Technology discusses natural language processing (NLP). NLP techniques can be used to analyze a variety of data sources, including news reports, company regulatory filings and earnings calls, as well as posts on social media sites such as Reddit. The output from these models can be used for stock selection with varying time horizons and degrees of alpha capture. This data can also be used to analyze sentiment regarding the ESG footprint of both public and private companies.