US companies added 144,000 workers to payrolls in December, well below the 198,000 advance in November, the Labor Department reports. The softer increase was conspicuous in the year-over-year trend too, reaffirming what’s been clear for some time: the labor market’s well past its peak for this point in the cycle as job creation continues to shift into lower gear.
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Around the turn of the century, the first wave of mutual funds trying to replicate hedge fund strategies started rolling off the financial industry’s assembly line. With more than a decade of results in hand, we can begin to assess how this experiment in publicly traded funds has fared. As you might expect, the results are mixed. But that tends to be true for active management generally. Let’s dig a bit deeper and focus on so-called alternative investing categories for mutual funds, as defined by Morningstar, starting with long-short equity strategies. In follow-up pieces, I’ll look at other alternative categories.
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