A Primer on Alternative Asset Classes
The earliest of financial investments, pre-dating traditional stocks and bonds, were investments in private companies, private property, privately negotiated debt (non-bank loans made to companies, individuals or governments) and commodities like gold, wheat and corn. These private investments came about in a widespread manner in the middle of the 19th century. In the last 100…
Read MoreRecession Playbook
Our Recession Playbook is our strategy for managing your portfolio through the coming few years in the face of a potential global recession. Given that almost all past bear markets have coincided with global recessions, we make little distinction between a strategy for investing through recessions or protracted market downturns. We see them as one…
Read MoreA Radical New Approach to the Endowment Model
Is there a more attractive alternative to the Endowment Model of Investing? Today? No. But we raise this question as the universe of high returning strategies that have little correlation with traditional financial market returns continues to expand. Five years into our pursuit of so-called ‘Alternative-Alternative’ strategies, we are close to having sufficient options to build…
Read MoreThe Cyclicality of Manager Alpha
2016 represented a year by which active investors had crowded into virtually every corner of the investment world, exhausting any remaining pockets of inefficiency and saw more managers under-performing their benchmarks than we can recall in our 16 year history. As expected, we saw a capitulation by many capital owners who moved more of their…
Read MoreTechnology’s Impact on Active Investing
Big Data, or the growing universe of information traversing the web, that is available to systematic and fundamental active managers is changing the competitive landscape favouring those firms best able to find and process such data into powerful investment insights. We expect the greatest alpha generation in the future to come from those fundamental managers…
Read MoreCracking The Code on Manager Selection
This is an updated version of our whitepaper on what it takes to make a great investor which captures insights from legendary investors of the past as well as the next generation. The original version was written as a briefing document for three separate working dinners with distinguished asset managers, which took place in NYC,…
Read MoreThe Most Basic Lessons of Investing
This note describes the most important learning about investing including some very basic principles and some useful tools. Many of these are rooted in fundamental academic research, and generally accepted. A few are only supported by what we believe to be compelling common sense. We would expect that the most sophisticated and successful institutional investors…
Read MoreHow to Evaluate Investment Performance
Most active investment managers fail to justify their fees. Apparent outperformance is often the result of specific market risks, not manager skill. Partners Capital uses a systematic look-through risk quantification process to separate market risks from manager skill. This allows our clients to allocate capital to those managers who are most likely to generate a…
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