After the damage of the global financial crisis, funds should be submitting themselves for voluntary financial health checks to diagnose vulnerabilities and pinpoint risks, asset consulting firm Mercer says. 
Do funds of hedge funds really add value?
This paper, by Serge Darolles of Lyxor Asset Management, and Mathieu Vaissie, research associate at EDHEC-Risk Institute, looks at the performance of funds of hedge funds through the crisis, and introduces a return-based attribution model allowing for the full decomposition of funds of hedge funds’ performance.
Liquidity as an investment style
This paper by Yale School of Management Professors, Roger Ibbotson and Zhiwu Chen, shows that liquidity, as measured by stock turnover or trading volume, is an economically significant and distinct investment style, and introduces and examines the performance of several portfolio strategies.
Dodd-Frank Act will stand or fall on right people
At a Yale-hosted roundtable on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, professor of economics, Robert Shiller, said the success of the Act, and the agencies created to study aspects of the market, will depend on appointing the right people, who should be willing to take advice from his fellow economists. Click here to read more.
Harvard endowment hones managers
Harvard Management Company will increase manager concentration levels, look closely at commodities and real estate, and bring more assets in-house where appropriate, as it moves into fiscal year 2011 with an unchanged long-term asset allocation.
New world order: Mercer offers its blueprint to cope
Mercer Investment Consulting has produced its foreshadowed paper on global equities, which urges clients to have a major rethink about their benchmarks and portfolio construction. Greg Bright spoke with the paper’s main author, Nick White.
