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-- Posted Thursday, 4 March 2010 | Digg This Article | | Source: GoldSeek.com
Each year ArabianMoney attends the annual Hedge Funds World conference in Dubai and this event gives an excellent snapshot of the industry and what the super-bright hedge fund managers are thinking about the best investment classes of the moment. This year the conference was higher in spirits than in the depths of the market lows last year. But attendance of 200-plus was well below the crowd of well over a thousand in the mid-90s. Of course Gulf countries have gone from boom to bust. Regional cash flow But the cash flow from the region still has to be invested somewhere. Diversification away from local real estate and even Gulf stocks is a theme now, perhaps a little belatedly. Hedge fund managers have some answers. Currency funds are popular, and intelligent bets against the euro and pound are a theme, as is the rally in the dollar. Buy the dollar, or by proxy with the dirham or other Gulf currencies, and sell the euro and pound. Emerging markets also made an unsurprising appearance. However, the new twist is that investors want funds that can go short as well as long. In other words, the warning is that emerging markets could quickly shift from boom to bust so a long-only fund is not recommended. The consensus on global markets seemed difficult to reach. But overall the markets ’seem to be at an inflection point’ warned one of the region’s best analysts. A downward shift followed by a volatile trading range was one view, albeit one that favored investment in the appropriate hedge fund. Gold tipped There was a convincing presentation on gold investment from Sentry Select Capital that stressed the dwindling supply of gold as an underpinning market phenomenon. Here the argument was to invest in smaller gold stocks for the best performance in the bull market. Apart from these bold suggestions, the hedge fund managers were largely hedging their opinions this year and tended to focus on their own skills as active traders – perhaps the best justification for their fees and an argument against ETF cloning of their performance (see this article). A thoughtful expert panelist explained that equities might well be locked in a trading range going nowhere like in 1966-82, real estate still looked incredibly overvalued and bonds were a bubble about to burst. That left commodities. If so living in an oil region might not be so bad after all.
-- Posted Thursday, 4 March 2010 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com
Previous Articles by Peter Cooper
About Peter Cooper:
Oxford University educated financial journalist Peter Cooper found himself made redundant by Emap plc in London in the mid-1990s and decided to rebuild his career in Dubai as launch editor of the pioneering magazine Gulf Business. He returned briefly to London in
1999 to complete his first book, a history of the Bovis construction group.
Then in 2000 he went back to Dubai to become an Internet entrepreneur, just as the dot-com market crashed. But he stumbled across the opportunity to become a partner in www.ameinfo.com, which later became the Middle East's leading English language business news website.
 Over the course of the next seven years he had a ringside seat as editor-in-chief writing about the remarkable transformation of Dubai into a global business and financial hub city. At the same time www.ameinfo.com prospered and was sold in 2006 to Emap plc for $27 million, completing the career circle back to where it began a decade earlier.
He remains a lively commentator and columnist as a freelance journalist based in Dubai and travels extensively each summer with his wife Svetlana. His financial blog www.arabianmoney.net is attracting increasing attention with its focus on investment in gold and silver as a means of prospering during a time of great consumer price inflation and asset price deflation.
Order my book online from this link
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