The hedge fund industry boomed in the 1990s, and the value of assets managed by hedge funds worldwide grew steadily until 2007. The value fell markedly the following year because of the financial crisis and did not recover until 2013. In 2024, the value of assets under management (AUM) of hedge funds reached over **** trillion U.S. dollars. Which firms dominate the hedge fund industry? The biggest hedge funds in the market typically attain their size by combining exceptional results, a solid track record, and efficient risk management tactics. In 2023, Field Street Capital Management was the biggest hedge fund company, with nearly *** billion U.S. dollars of assets under management. Some other prominent global hedge funds by AUM include Citadel, Bridgewater Associates, Mariner Investment Group LLC, etc. These industry giants often boast a diverse range of investment strategies and maintain a global presence, which allows them to capitalize on opportunities across diverse sectors and assets. Hedge Funds: What's changing? Hedge funds constantly tweak their investment strategies to keep up with market shifts. The cryptocurrency market introduces a novel asset class that is distinct from traditional financial markets. Therefore, the primary reason behind hedge funds investing in digital assets was to diversify their portfolios. The escalating interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology prompted hedge funds to explore new prospects and risks associated with digital assets. In 2021, the average assets under management of crypto hedge funds more than doubled from the previous year, rising from ** to ** million U.S. dollars.

In recent years, industry assets have become increasingly integral to institutional investors' portfolios and the larger asset-management market. Institutional investors are individuals or organizations that trade securities in such substantial volumes that they qualify for lower commissions and fewer protective regulations since it's assumed that they're knowledgeable enough to protect themselves. Increasing demand from institutional investors has contributed to the surge in the industry's assets under management (AUM) and revenue during the current period. In recent years, the industry has continued to enmesh itself more deeply within the broader financial ecosystem despite the challenges posed at the onset of the period. The pandemic, mainly in the first quarter of 2020, contributed to revenue declines for many operators. Many portfolios, previously thought to be sound investments, were reevaluated and businesses pivoted their strategies due to the unprecedented nature of the crisis. However, as inflation was rampant in the latter part of the period, the FED increased interest rates to control high inflation, although as inflationary pressures eased in 2024, the FED cut interest rates, which will increase liquidity in financial markets. The Fed is anticipated to cut rates further in 2025, increasing liquidity and driving the shift of investments into equities from fixed-income securities. Overall, over the past five years, industry revenue grew at a CAGR of 4.2% to $310.1 billion, including an increase of 2.5% in 2025 alone. Industry profit has climbed significantly and will comprise 49.6% of revenue in the current year. Industry revenue will grow at a CAGR of 2.7% to $353.7 billion over the five years to 2030. The Federal Reserve is anticipated to cut interest rates as inflationary pressures continue to ease. These declining interest rates will increase liquidity in the markets. Private equity firms and hedge funds will have less difficulty raising capital for investments. As characteristics of the financial system change in light of post-financial crisis banking regulations and regulators' recognition of the importance of hedge funds within the financial system, hedge funds will likely experience heightened oversight.

This is not going to be an article or Op-Ed about Michael Jordan. Since 2009 we've been in the longest bull-market in history, that's 11 years and counting. However a few metrics like the stock market P/E, the call to put ratio and of course the Shiller P/E suggest a great crash is coming in-between the levels of 1929 and the dot.com bubble. Mean reversion historically is inevitable and the Fed's printing money experiment could end in disaster for the stock market in late 2021 or 2022. You can read Jeremy Grantham's Last Dance article here. You are likely well aware of Michael Burry's predicament as well. It's easier for you just to skim through two related videos on this topic of a stock market crash. Michael Burry's Warning see this YouTube. Jeremy Grantham's Warning See this YouTube. Typically when there is a major event in the world, there is a crash and then a bear market and a recovery that takes many many months. In March, 2020 that's not what we saw since the Fed did some astonishing things that means a liquidity sloth and the risk of a major inflation event. The pandemic represented the quickest decline of at least 30% in the history of the benchmark S&P 500, but the recovery was not correlated to anything but Fed intervention. Since the pandemic clearly isn't disappearing and many sectors such as travel, business travel, tourism and supply chain disruptions appear significantly disrupted - the so-called economic recovery isn't so great. And there's this little problem at the heart of global capitalism today, the stock market just keeps going up. Crashes and corrections typically occur frequently in a normal market. But the Fed liquidity and irresponsible printing of money is creating a scenario where normal behavior isn't occurring on the markets. According to data provided by market analytics firm Yardeni Research, the benchmark index has undergone 38 declines of at least 10% since the beginning of 1950. Since March, 2020 we've barely seen a down month. September, 2020 was flat-ish. The S&P 500 has more than doubled since those lows. Look at the angle of the curve: The S&P 500 was 735 at the low in 2009, so in this bull market alone it has gone up 6x in valuation. That's not a normal cycle and it could mean we are due for an epic correction. I have to agree with the analysts who claim that the long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. There is a complacency, buy-the dip frenzy and general meme environment to what BigTech can do in such an environment. The weight of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Nvidia and Tesla together in the S&P and Nasdaq is approach a ridiculous weighting. When these stocks are seen both as growth, value and companies with unbeatable moats the entire dynamics of the stock market begin to break down. Check out FANG during the pandemic. BigTech is Seen as Bullet-Proof me valuations and a hysterical speculative behavior leads to even higher highs, even as 2020 offered many younger people an on-ramp into investing for the first time. Some analysts at JP Morgan are even saying that until retail investors stop charging into stocks, markets probably don’t have too much to worry about. Hedge funds with payment for order flows can predict exactly how these retail investors are behaving and monetize them. PFOF might even have to be banned by the SEC. The risk-on market theoretically just keeps going up until the Fed raises interest rates, which could be in 2023! For some context, we're more than 1.4 years removed from the bear-market bottom of the coronavirus crash and haven't had even a 5% correction in nine months. This is the most over-priced the market has likely ever been. At the night of the dot-com bubble the S&P 500 was only 1,400. Today it is 4,500, not so many years after. Clearly something is not quite right if you look at history and the P/E ratios. A market pumped with liquidity produces higher earnings with historically low interest rates, it's an environment where dangerous things can occur. In late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, that seemed like a lot, but nothing compared to today. For some context, the S&P 500 Shiller P/E closed last week at 38.58, which is nearly a two-decade high. It's also well over double the average Shiller P/E of 16.84, dating back 151 years. So the stock market is likely around 2x over-valued. Try to think rationally about what this means for valuations today and your favorite stock prices, what should they be in historical terms? The S&P 500 is up 31% in the past year. It will likely hit 5,000 before a correction given the amount of added liquidity to the system and the QE the Fed is using that's like a huge abuse of MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. This has also lent to bubbles in the housing market, crypto and even commodities like Gold with long-term global GDP meeting many headwinds in the years ahead due to a...

In 2024, ** percent of adults in the United States invested in the stock market. This figure has remained steady over the last few years, and is still below the levels before the Great Recession, when it peaked in 2007 at ** percent. What is the stock market? The stock market can be defined as a group of stock exchanges, where investors can buy shares in a publicly traded company. In more recent years, it is estimated an increasing number of Americans are using neobrokers, making stock trading more accessible to investors. Other investments A significant number of people think stocks and bonds are the safest investments, while others point to real estate, gold, bonds, or a savings account. Since witnessing the significant one-day losses in the stock market during the Financial Crisis, many investors were turning towards these alternatives in hopes for more stability, particularly for investments with longer maturities. This could explain the decrease in this statistic since 2007. Nevertheless, some speculators enjoy chasing the short-run fluctuations, and others see value in choosing particular stocks.

As of June 17, 2024, the most shorted stock was for, the American holographic technology services provider, MicroCloud Hologram Inc., with 66.64 percent of their total float having been shorted. This is a change from mid-January 2021, when video game retailed GameStop had an incredible 121.07 percent of their available shares in a short position. In effect this means that investors had 'borrowed' more shares (with a future promise to return them) than the total number of shares available for public trading. Owing to this behavior of professional investors, retail investors enacted a campaign to drive up the stock price of Gamestop, leading to losses of billions when investors had to repurchase the stock they had borrowed. At this time, a similar – but less effective – social media campaign was also carried out for the stock price of cinema operator AMC, and the price of silver. What is short selling? Short selling is essentially where an investor bets on a share price falling by: borrowing a number of shares selling these shares while the price is still high; purchasing the same number again once the price falls; then returning the borrowed shares at a profit. Of course, a profit will only be made if the share price does fall; should the share price rise the investor will then need to purchase the shares back at a higher price, and thus incur a loss. Short selling can lead to some very large profits in a short amount of time, with Tesla stock generating over one billion dollars in short sell profits during the first week of March 2020 alone, owing to the financial crash caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. However, owing to the short-term, opportunistic nature of short selling, these returns look less impressive when considered as net profits from short sell positions over the full year. The risks of short selling Short selling carries greater risks than traditional investments, and for this reason financial advisors often recommend against this strategy for ‘retail’ (i.e. non-professional) investors. The reason for this is that losses from short selling are potentially uncapped, whereas losses from traditional investments are limited to the initial cost. For example, if someone purchases 100 dollars of shares, the maximum they can lose is the 100 dollars the spent on those shares. However, say someone borrows 100 dollars of shares instead, betting on the price falling. If these shares are then sold for 100 dollars but the price subsequently rises, the losses could greatly exceed the initial investment should the price rise to, say, 500 dollars. The risks of short selling can be seen by looking again at Tesla, with the company causing the greatest losses over 2020 from short selling at over 40 billion U.S. dollars.

Regulatory Foundations and Market Structure Enabling the UBS–Banco Popular Investment Fund Collapse in Puerto Rico

Description:
This dataset contains primary legal and financial documents that form the regulatory and promotional backdrop to the UBS–Banco Popular investment fund collapse that severely impacted retail investors in Puerto Rico. Specifically, it includes:

1. The Puerto Rico Investment Companies Act of 2000 (Act 158-2000): This amendment to the 1954 law allowed greater flexibility for investment companies to invest in taxable securities and lowered registration fees. It contributed to the expansion of domestic fund structures that would later be used to package and resell Puerto Rico government debt.

2. The Puerto Rico Investment Companies Act of 2013 (Act 93-2013): A major legislative overhaul designed to stimulate local investment post-Section 936, this law incentivized fund growth while relaxing regulatory oversight. Despite its stated goals of transparency and job creation, it opened the door for conflicts of interest, excessive leverage, and opaque risk disclosures—key elements in the later UBS fund crisis.

3. UBS Puerto Rico Investors Funds Disclosure Brochure: A marketing and disclosure document produced by UBS Asset Managers of Puerto Rico. It explains the investment logic, tax advantages, and structural differences of Puerto Rico mutual funds—none of which were subject to U.S. SEC regulation. It also outlines how UBS and Popular Asset Management co-managed closed-end funds that lacked liquidity, included high concentrations of Puerto Rico government debt, and traded in a secondary market controlled by UBS itself.

Together, these materials demonstrate how Puerto Rico's unique legal and financial infrastructure—deliberately exempt from key U.S. federal protections—was exploited by financial actors. These documents serve as a critical foundation for understanding the systemic and regulatory failures that enabled the UBS–Banco Popular fund collapse, resulting in billions in investor losses.

Keywords:
Puerto Rico, UBS, Banco Popular, investment fraud, closed-end funds, Puerto Rico Investment Companies Act, financial regulation, securities law, mutual fund collapse, legal infrastructure, SEC exemption, investor protection

Related Papers or Use Cases:

• Law review articles on mutual fund regulation in colonial jurisdictions

• Empirical analyses of retail investor losses in the UBS Puerto Rico fund collapse

• Studies on the regulatory capture and legal carve-outs in territorial finance

The linkages between the US and China, the world’s two major agricultural powers, have brought great uncertainty to the global food markets. Inspired by these, this paper examines the extreme risk spillovers between US and Chinese agricultural futures markets during significant crises. We use a copula-conditional value at risk (CoVaR) model with Markov-switching regimes to capture the tail dependence in their pair markets. The study covers the period from January 2006 to December 2022 and identifies two distinct dependence regimes (stable and crisis periods). Moreover, we find significant and asymmetric upside/downside extreme risk spillovers between the US and Chinese markets, which are highly volatile in crises. Additionally, the impact of international capital flows (the financial channel) on risk spillovers is particularly pronounced during the global financial crisis. During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine 2022 war, the impact of supply chain disruptions (the non-financial channel) is highlighted. Our findings provide a theoretical reference for monitoring the co-movements in agricultural futures markets and practical insights for managing investment portfolios and enhancing food market stability during crises.

Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ) was the crypto billionaire who lost the most money following the crypto crisis of 2022, with a net worth drop amounting to 82 billion U.S. dollars. Zhao was followed by FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who lost a reported 23 billion dollars in only three weeks prior to his arrest over conspiracy and fraud charges in late 2022.

Despite his losses, Zhao was still the wealthiest individual in the crypto world as of December 2022. The same five crypto chiefs who lost the most money in 2022 ranked as the five richest people in crypto before the market's crash.

Treasure in tatters: FTX founder arrested over fraud
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on December 12, 2022, over wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Once the fourth largest crypto exchange in the world, FTX filed for bankruptcy following a liquidity crisis in November 2022. This happened after it tried to sell a considerable chunk of its operating business to rival Binance, only for the latter to walk away from the deal - stating that it was beyond its ability to help FTX solve its issues.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused Bankman-Fried of setting up a scheme to defraud investors amid reports of the former FTX chief diverting customer funds to his Alameda Research hedge fund. Bankman-Fried has denied any wrongdoing, including allegations of him being aware of Alameda Research using FTX customer funds.

The China commercial real estate market, valued at $890 million in 2025, is projected to experience steady growth, driven by robust economic expansion and increasing urbanization. A Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 3.49% from 2025 to 2033 indicates a significant market expansion. Key growth drivers include rising consumer spending, a burgeoning e-commerce sector fueling demand for logistics and warehousing space, and ongoing investments in infrastructure development within key cities. The market is segmented by property type, with office, retail, industrial (logistics), and hospitality sectors contributing significantly. Strong performance in the logistics sector is particularly noteworthy, fueled by the expansion of e-commerce giants and the need for efficient supply chains. However, factors such as government regulations aimed at curbing speculative investment and potential economic fluctuations pose challenges to sustained growth. Competition among major players like Wanda Group, Greenland Business Group, and CapitaLand is intense, fostering innovation and driving down prices in certain segments. The forecast period (2025-2033) presents opportunities for strategic investors and developers to capitalize on the growth trajectory while mitigating the potential risks associated with economic volatility and regulatory changes. The historical period (2019-2024) likely showcased fluctuating growth based on national economic policies and global events. This makes understanding those historical impacts crucial to future investment strategies. The dominance of major players suggests a concentrated market, but smaller, regional developers are also carving out niches. The continued expansion of China’s middle class and increasing disposable income will further stimulate demand across all sectors, especially in the retail and hospitality segments. However, sustainable development and environmental concerns are likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping future market trends, pushing developers towards green building practices and energy-efficient designs. The evolving regulatory landscape necessitates a cautious approach, requiring careful risk assessment and compliance strategies for successful long-term investment. Future growth will hinge on adapting to both economic and environmental demands. Recent developments include: May 2023: The Beijing Suning Life Plaza mixed-use complex was recently purchased from Suning for about USD 400 million by CapitaLand Investment Private Fund with the help of Cushman & Wakefield's Greater China Capital Markets division., April 2023: AIA put US$1.3 billion into a Shanghai office-retail complex, while Ping An paid about US$7 billion for industrial and office assets in Shanghai and Beijing. Insurers, including AIA and Ping An Life Insurance, are investing billions of dollars in mainland China properties, which are expected to remain an attractive asset class for insurers despite the property market downturn.. Key drivers for this market are: Foreign Investments driving the market, Implementation of government policies driving the market. Potential restraints include: Foreign Investments driving the market, Implementation of government policies driving the market. Notable trends are: Technology and Innovation Driving the Market.

K-S test for the asymmetry of risk spillovers from the US to China and from China to the US.

In the decade after the 2008 financial crisis, pension providers across faced challenging conditions thanks to interest rates falling to historical lows, affecting the returns on fixed-income investments, like bonds. Revenue is expected to drop at a compound annual rate of 2.6% over the five years through 2025 to €517.9 billion, including a forecast climb of 2.5% in 2025. Profit has also edged downwards due to higher interest rates and geopolitical tensions hitting equity and bond markets, though the average industry profit margin still stands strong, at an estimated 43.7% in 2025. Pension providers invest the contributions of policyholders into investment markets like bonds and equity, with the aim of making sure their assets can meet their liabilities – the benefits paid to retirees. Pension funds invest heavily in bond markets due to their relatively low risk and low volatility. However, this type of fixed-income investment has struggled since 2022 in the rising base rate environment, which saw yields skyrocket and bond prices plummet, hitting investment income. Despite interest rates coming down over the two years through 2025, bond values have remained extremely volatile, creating difficulties in calculating long-term planning and solvency of funds. Bond markets have also been clouded by ongoing uncertainty surrounding upcoming rate cuts and trade tensions, eroding investment income. Equity markets have experienced a similarly volatile period over recent years, with investors pricing rate cuts at the tail-end of 2023, inciting hefty capital flows, and supporting investment income for funds exposed to the asset class. In 2024, US equities performed particularly well due to the dominance of big-tech firms and the excitement surrounding AI. However, Trump’s erratic policies has incited a shift away from US markets in 2025, aiding pension funds with exposure to European markets, which are seen as less risky. Revenue is anticipated to climb at a compound annual rate of 6% over the five years through 2030 to €691.5 billion, while the average industry profit margin is estimated to swell to 45.3% in 2030. The shift towards Europe markets is set to continue in the short term. However, governments must be proactive in taking measures to capitalise on this demand. This would involve the expansion of a safe investment base of sovereign bonds jointly issued by euro members, overcoming the investment headaches that traditionally arose from fragmented national government bond markets and creating a liquid market for pension funds to exploit, aiding investment income. However, an ageing population will remain a concern for pension providers as more people retire and claim their retirement benefits, ratcheting up liabilities.

The Pension Funding industry provides retirement benefits for people no longer earning an income. The industry includes both occupational and personal pension schemes. State pensions are excluded from this industry.

The selected optimal copula based on log-likelihood values.

Descriptive statistics of the sample from January 2006 to May 2020.

Summarization of the VaR, CoVaR, and ΔCoVaR for agricultural futures.

The regression results during the US-China trade war (only including the period before the COVID-19 pandemic).

The regression results during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022.