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White Paper
Active Extension
November 24, 2025
This paper explores how Active Extension (AE)—a long-short framework—may enhance portfolio performance. By allowing skilled managers to short unattractive stocks and overweight more attractive ones, AE offers a liquid, capital-efficient path to improved active returns and long-term wealth outcomes.
White Paper
Diversifying Alternatives and the Rearview Mirror
November 3, 2025
Part 10: This paper examines how investor biases and performance-chasing behaviors can undermine the benefits of long/short diversifying alternatives. We explore why such strategies often feel disappointing in bull markets, yet remain vital for long-term portfolio resilience.
White Paper
Portable Alpha: Why Now?
February 20, 2025
As stock market valuations continue to rise and expected returns correspondingly fall, many investors are hoping to rely more on alpha from active management to make up for a potential future return gap. Unfortunately, long-only active management has struggled during recent history. We review why portable alpha may be an attractive alternative solution in today’s market environment. We also discuss what aspects of a portable alpha solution are important for investors to consider when selecting between implementations.
Quick Takes
Exploring Portable Alpha
September 23, 2024
Long-only active management has been challenging. Portable alpha provides investors with more ways to incorporate alpha into their equity exposure.
White Paper
Portable Alpha: Still A Great Solution For Improving Return Outcomes
July 30, 2024
In the face of lower-than-average expected returns for equities, some investors may be considering adding active management to their equity allocations. However, the evidence supporting active long-only equities has long been underwhelming. We review an alternative approach – portable alpha.
Alternative Thinking
Can Machines Time Markets? The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction
May 6, 2024
Common wisdom has suggested that small, simple models are best suited for market timing applications, given finance’s “small data” constraint and naturally low predictability. However, we show that complex models better identify true nonlinear relationships and therefore produce better market timing strategy performance. We validate this "virtue of complexity" result in three practical market timing applications.
Journal Article
Levering Up to Do Good: Direct Long-Short Investing and Charitable Giving
April 23, 2024
We use historical strategy simulations to evaluate the advantages of donating appreciated stock in the context of tax-aware long-short factor strategies. We find long-short strategies exhibit several advantages over long-only investments.
White Paper
Is Your Equity Hedge Fund Portfolio Resilient Enough for Uncertain Times?
February 6, 2024
We analyze the historical macroeconomic sensitivity of traditional asset classes and major hedge fund strategies. We show that the average hedge fund is unlikely to provide meaningful diversification during periods of macro uncertainty, which are also typically difficult for traditional assets. However, long/short low-risk strategies have tended to exhibit low macro sensitivity.
Key Design Choices in Long/Short Equity
December 5, 2023
Investors are looking for resilient sources of return in the face of mounting headwinds for equity markets. Long/short and market-neutral equity strategies deserve consideration. We review the case for allocating to long/short equity and address several key choices faced by investors and by managers.
Perspective
Shorting Counts
February 23, 2022
Man Group recently wrote an op-ed titled “Short-selling does not count as a carbon offset.” Of course we agree it doesn’t. But the headline is quite misleading if taken to mean shorting has no role in the fight to reduce carbon emissions. Shorting does exactly what it’s supposed to do – raise the cost of capital to the emitters, even more so than divestment.