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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?