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FSA Wants to Ban "Toxic" Life Settlements : Calling life settlements "toxic", the Financial Services Authority in the U.K. said it  wants to   ban them from being marketed to retail investors. Oh yes, they should - this is not a retail product.

Cayman directors sit on hundreds of boards I was aware of the fact, but not of the scale of this phenomena . Does make you wonder what do these people get paid for... ■

The article in FT titled  Few FoHFs yield value, report says  claims fund of hedge funds are largely equivalent to a random selection of a basket of hedge funds, and fail to generate alpha on the fee-adjusted basis. Maybe. But they do all the dirty work on monitoring, re-balancing and (only the better ones) keeping investors money away from fraud. Whether this deserves 1% of management fees and 10% incentive fees, is indeed subject to debate, but I do believe Fund of Hedge Funds have their own merit. Plus, the paper (of which original could not be obtained) apparently uses hedge fund indices for the analysis. I am sure most people are aware of how flawed these metrics are. Borrowing some statisticians parlance, this "fails to reject the hypothesis" of FoHF value added "within the confidence interval", in my humble opinion. On the other hand, not every Fund of Hedge Funds deserves high praise, with that I wholeheartedly agree. ■

Below is a ling to article in FT: Swiss and US set to clash again on bank secrecy : Reports say Washington has given Bern an ultimatum to deliver further names of American taxpayers with undisclosed Swiss accounts I have no doubts greedy bankers may have used a dirty move or two, but let me get this straight: so, is the US saying that THEIR laws should be applied to bank accounts in Switzerland? Maybe we should apply some Chinese laws to the bank accounts in US? Or maybe some African country laws? The US has serious issues with its supposed global dominance, and trying to regulate what other countries' banks are doing seems a dumb idea to me, given how the US regulatory authorities failed to regulate their own financial system, leading to spectacular blow-ups and dumping billions of taxpayer dollars onto the banks balance sheets. I realize that in this particular case, American citizens are involved, so there may be some justification to these demands, but the very idea that t

I'd like to share this post on LandThink blog, as I think it summarizes the pay structure and some of the issues in timberland investments very well. How Do Timberland Investment Managers (TIMOs) Make Money? ■

I'd like to cite a good acquaintance of mine. This is what he told us over a beer or two at a hedge funds networking event: We are drinking people with hedge fund problems, not hedge fund people with a drinking problem. Can't help but agree!.. to an extent.

Goldman Sachs just admitted they put Russia at the bottom of investment attractiveness within "Big 8" country group, at least within the private equity space. Why am I not surprised?

I took the liberty of commenting on an Alphaville post Death bonds’ unique risks . My comment is as follows: Life Settlements are clearly one of the asset classes you need to be extra-cautious investing into, but I have to disagree with the overall tone of this post, which appears to label ALL life settlement investments as money-losing and/or fraudulent products. Among the many life settlement investment managers I had a chance to speak with, there is a handful of people who seem to know what they are doing, having both the right industry experience and a (audited!) track record to back it up. The bottom line is, never invest into something you don't understand. Do your due diligence (especially if that is you fiduciary responsibility!). Pay attention to the valuation policy (no straight-line appreciation to life expectancy), type of policies (avoid those in their contestable period, be wary of the jumbo policies as they tend not to adhere to VBT), and check if the appropri

CFA Japan is conducting a seminar on insurance-linked products. The speaker, Mr. Masaaki Katusyama is an industry veteran, with deep knowledge of re-insurance business. He also has the ability to bridge the worlds of capital markets and insurance in a plain and easy-to-follow language. Highly recommended event. Details can be found here: ＣＡＴボンドへの投資 - 金融危機で実証された、分散効果の高い保険リンク証券投資戦略 ■

One passage in this article ( Madoff claims Ponzi scheme’s roots legal ) in FT sent me laughing out loud: "Mr Madoff also blamed institutional clients for failing to ask the right questions and regulators for failing to spot the fraud" So, it's not really HIS fault that investors were defrauded. They have themselves to blame... The man is total nuts. ■

Are you a dog person or a cat person? Well, I don't know about the dogs, but the "cats" have been gaining popularity with investors for some time now. Not that purring furry things, of course, but the Cat Bonds.

トヨタ、販売好転につながるか　電子制御「シロ」判定 やっぱりJapan bashingだったよね・・・

S&P downgrades Japan to AA- : "Yen madness on Thursday — following Standard & Poors’ downgrading of Japan’s credit rating to AA- from AA. Just some hours ago we were discussing with a HF manager what would happen if the JGBs crash. While this is unlikely to be the start of it, the outlook is anything but rosy.