Original investment's assets grow in more ways than one

The current compensation structures incorporated into hedge fund offering documents are a cesspool of the past executive abuses that were thought to have been extinct Jeff Banfield is a former hedge fund manager who made a very controversial speech a few years back — titled Heads They Win, Tails You Lose — about hedge fund compensation.

Over the next few weeks investors will be focused on how best to make their retirement savings grow. The solution for many will once again revolve around plowing their annual contribution into high-cost, underachieving mutual funds, which have been the go-to investment vehicle for Canadians for years. It’s a tough cycle to break, but one that investors should consider in favour of many other more attractive opportunities if they want to make the most of their investments.

If calls from Canadians studying for their MBA qualification at U.S. universities to Steve Divitkos, the founder and managing principal at RedLeaf Partners Management, are any indication, then the ranks of search funds that may be established in Canada are set to grow. “It seems that a number of them are interested, judging from the calls I have received,” said Divitkos, noting that search funds are a suitable investment platform for those “who are interested in the pursuit of entrepreneurship.”

By Faisal Humayun: The investment environment after the financial and economic crisis has been characterized by a high degree of volatility across asset classes. Taking short-term positions in such an environment can lead to extreme results (positive or negative).

By Stock Whiz:During the last several years, investors have taken note of the swelling prices and hearty returns that come with productive farms. Individuals and funds are increasingly seeing farmland as an ideal hard asset class. Farmland generates not only regular income, but also capital appreciation and can be used as a hedge against inflation.

Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKERestaurants, writing in Bloomberg:

Bonds are a good way to diversify your portfolio and smooth out the volatility in your stock holdings. For convenience’s sake, many investors turn to bond mutual funds, instead of holding individual bonds. That may be a bad choice. For the fixed-income portion of your portfolio, you should buy individual bonds rather than bond mutual funds for three main reasons.

Som Seif has packed a lot into his 36 years. In his first career he was as an investment banker at RBC Capital Markets, while in his second, a more public role, he was founder of the Canadian operations of Claymore Investments, a company that grew over seven years to $8-billion in assets under management before being sold to BlackRock early last year.