Niki Natarajan

A decade since the financial crisis empowered managed accounts as the institutional go-to structure for transparency, liquidity and control of hedge fund strategies, assets on dedicated platforms continue to grow, driven by convergence, customisation, emerging managers, and soon, socially conscious investing. The ability to parse big data is key if service-driven and allocator platforms want to enable investors to enhance ‘alpha’ operationally and structurally.

Rubbish or Resource?

“Plastic is indeed now on the menu” – Prince of Wales
Imagine an island three times the size of France in the Pacific. Idyllic, right? Hardly. This 1.6 million square kilometre floating mass is made of more than 1.8 trillion pieces of rubbish. Add to this that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea and the futures looks bleak. Yet, plastics is now in the throes of a revolution. How can both people and the planet profit from plastic?

Apocalypse When?
“We are facing a man-made disaster of global scale…Time is running out” Sir David Attenborough
Despite the Doomsday Clock hand remaining at two minutes to midnight for 2019, the imminent threats to humanity and the planet continue as world security enters a period of ‘new abnormal’. Three of the top five risks by likelihood (and four by impact) in the 2019 Global Risk Perception Survey are environmental.

On the friendly Hawai’ian isle of Molokai, Niki Natarajan reviews Advivum Journeys’ transformational retreat where through hula, candid portraits and life coaching, her Re-Imagined Self is ready to rock the second act on a women-only retreat.

Formal review of a life coaching retreat in Hawaii. An Advivum journey is a self-discovery process that reconnects you to your authentic self, re-igniting passion and purpose so that you return from the seven-night retreat with the glow of inner wisdom that will guide you towards life’s next stage.

Economics of Happiness
“The greatest wealth is health” – Virgil
Two thousand years ago, Virgil made a very good point. Today, wellness—the quality or state of being healthy—is a significant creator of wealth. Funded by the stressed-out city-living executive and the youth-seeking ‘Silver Tsunami’, the wellness economy is now converging with the global health care industry and growing at 6.4%, per annum, faster than the global economy.

Interviewing veteran hedge fund investor Jeffrey Tarrant on the future of asset management, Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

Impact of Insta Travel
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts” ― Mark Twain
Snap, crop, filter, geo-tag, share. Repeat. At more than 300 million Instagram posts, #travel is today’s postcard. It is hardly surprising therefore that millennials—the digital natives who prioritise experiences over material possessions—pick their travel destination according to ‘Instagram-ability’.

Niki Natarajan reviews a Skyros holistic holiday at Atsitsa Bay on Skyros Island in Greece, and through creative writing and yoga finds dreams long buried under the overwhelm of her life.

“Climate change increasingly poses one of the biggest long-term threats to [pension, life insurance and nest egg] investments and the wealth of the global economy” ~ Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Google climate change and you are likely to get some 350 million articles in 0.38 seconds. The overarching consensus is that current global warming has a greater than 95% probabi...

Pension funds, university endowments, foundations, insurance companies, cities, such as New York State, and faith-based organisations globally are all part of a fossil fuel company divestment movement that began on university campuses in the US in 2011. The value of the 893 institutions divesting is $6.15 trillion and more than 58,000 individuals are divesting some $5.2 billion, according to Go Fossil Free.

Last week, the Republic...

A deep dive into what has changed in the commodity trading adviser space over the last decade and how algorithms are becoming ever more advanced.

Alpha from long/short equity investing seems to have got lost in the beta story of the past nine years but managers are finding new ways to pursue long/short equity strategies. Key points:
• High-equity beta has drowned the equity long/short alpha story
• Europe and Japan are markets that still have opportunities for regional alpha
• Some contend that a quantamental approach, combining man and machine, is the future of fundamental equity research

A constructive challenge or threat for hedge funds?

Investors are seeking specific plays in their search for value in these low-interest-rate times