Alphablock

Category: Primers

  • BITW underperforms BTC by 121%!

    BITW underperforms BTC by 121%!

    If you know Crypto, you probably know BITW, which is the fastest-growing ETF today in the crypto space. With nearly 400 million USD invested in the product, you the investor or asset owner [Who’s already invested or plans to invest] may think that there should be something awesome here, like product innovation, alternative asset awareness…

  • Why A New Smart Beta?

    Why A New Smart Beta?

    What is Smart Beta? And why do we need it? Smart Beta is a method to rebuild a portfolio with a weighting scheme different from the market capitalized weightage method. The weighting scheme can be based on fundamental factors different from size e.g. revenue, economic value etc. Most popular benchmarks today are built using the…

  • Investment Management Fintech 101

    Investment Management Fintech 101

    Venture capital companies have to work through a lot of confusion when it comes to allocating capital to Investment Management Fintechs. It’s natural because Active Investment Management itself is facing an upheaval when it comes to fees, increases in compliance, financial theory redundancies [1], and foremost, the lack of Alpha. A Venture firm can’t be…

  • Warren, SPY, Machines and Concentration Risk

    Warren, SPY, Machines and Concentration Risk

    Concentration is the most undermined risk working against long-term wealth generation. The reason you have not heard about it is that both active and passive investment management indulge in concentrated portfolios and don’t think there is anything wrong with the approach. In addition, human active asset managers’ skill of stock selection is rare, and hard…

  • Atlas of AI

    Atlas of AI

    Kate Crawford’s “Atlas of AI” is a masterwork in technological thinking. Rarely do I find a thinking alignment regarding the brain model as a narrow definition of intelligence [Human AI]. However, this is the first time, I have seen someone reflecting on media as a geological process, which indirectly questions the foundational assumption about information…

  • How To Cash?

    How To Cash?

    The $100 trillion managed globally as your pension and active investments is primarily discretionary. The human does the job. But the future is about machines managing your pension and investments because humans have a poor track record. Machines have a lot of problems to solve, starting from bias to teaching investors how and why to…

  • The 45° Test

    The 45° Test

    The 45° Test If you want to test machines that claim to beat the market, you should use the 45° test, which says that if the market has to cover the longest distance, it should not travel at 60° or 30° but 45°. Because the higher the slant less sustainable the structure, the lower the…

  • Alpha is ESG!

    Alpha is ESG!

    Alpha is ESG! Alpha is an ESG concept. Alpha is the returns above the benchmark. If the S&P 500 delivers 5% in a year and say for example the Exceptional & Rich U.S. 500 delivers 15% using the same 500, at a similar annual turnover and volatility, for the same period, the Alpha is 10%.…

  • Flummoxed by Netflix!

    Flummoxed by Netflix!

    Flummoxed by Netflix! If you feel unlucky having had the misfortune of holding both Facebook and Netflix (NFLX) and first seeing your Facebook holdings explode and now Netflix, you might want to find a way to avoid getting flummoxed again. Source: Google Finance Smart investing is not just about What you hold, it’s also about…

  • ~ 10 % risk-weighted excess returns!

    ~ 10 % risk-weighted excess returns!

    If Wired magazine readers would have a liking for financial fiction, the six-word headline of this article would be a featured story for various reasons. First; 30 year annualized returns for S&P 500 have been around 10% and it required buy-hold and forget from the 1990s. Second; Warren Buffett and a handful more have delivered…