Direct Alternative Investments

For clients who have experience with alternative investing, or those who desire in-depth portfolio customization or optimization, we offer our services as a direct alternative investments consultant. The fees of investing directly in alternative investments are significantly lower, the ability to target specific risk/reward characteristics is made easier, and clients receive increased transparency and control of their investments.

The market of hedge funds, private equity, real assets, and other alternative investments has changed dramatically over the last fifteen years. The development of our research, selection, and monitoring processes reflects these changes, while leveraging the experience and lessons from our work on traditional investment managers. We have all the requisite publicly-available databases and risk modeling capabilities, but we believe that it is our skeptical and insightful alternatives research team, sharpened by ambitious due diligence schedules, that adds value in providing perspective on alternatives investment providers for our clients.

Public information on alternative investment managers, while plentiful, is plagued with difficulties that make decision-making on those data unreliable. Most alternative investment databases are populated with unaudited data supplied by the managers themselves. Poor managers do not report their information. Top managers tend not to report, either. These result in public databases which are far from robust.

Consequently, we have built our own databases. Our proprietary databases of several thousand alternative investment funds are populated primarily by data we collect and maintain. This assures not only better quality data, but broader manager coverage than the public databases. The information we organize is not just quantitative, but includes the vital qualitative insights from our research teams necessary for determining and tracking a manager's sustainable competitive advantage.

The insights and information documented in our databases are the product of rigorous due diligence covering each alternative manager's organization, personnel, investment philosophy, investment research, trade execution, back office functions, and portfolio management. Our due diligence process goes beyond merely analyzing historical performance and conducting background checks. We seek to understand the way managers think about their firms, their markets, their risks, investing, all their clients, and their portfolios in order to assess not only investment skill, but also character and motivation. These help us determine whether a manager has a competitive advantage, and whether that advantage is likely to be sustainable for our clients.