Other Alternative Investments - Articles & White Papers

QIC believes the prognosis for health and wellness to deliver consistent, reliable returns and provide defensive positioning for portfolios is strong. Equally as strong is the high-returning alpha potential of new, emerging technologies that are rapidly driving medical advances.

The health and wellness space will…

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have made great strides, resulting in significant investor interest. Still, the technologies are not well understood and the investment landscape remains underexplored. In this Mindscope, we investigate the risks and benefits of…

While cryptocurrency investment remains niche in the institutional investor community, interest in asset tokenization and stablecoins is gaining momentum.

Alternative risk premium (ARP) solutions have shown significant performance dispersion over the past two years. Some of them, including ours, achieved positive performance. But most failed to deliver on their promise and did not provide the expected diversification benefits, in particular during the equity market crash in…

As emitters of nearly one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, industrial sectors are key players in the effort to mitigate damages from climate change. However, investing in the low-carbon technologies necessary to reduce industrial carbon emissions—particularly for industrial sectors with energy-…

Bitcoin has increasingly been drawing attention from the investment community over the past few years. While the cryptocurrency has successfully bagged illustrious headlines such as “best-performing asset of the year”, those have often been followed by major downturns in a short span of time. Interestingly, it also shows a…

While historically Asia Pacific (APAC) has trailed North America and Europe in establishing markets for new asset classes, when it comes to digital assets, the region’s FinTech industry is setting the pace. Many of its exchanges and regulators are moving swiftly to put new supporting infrastructure in place, and regional…

This paper outlines the current U.S. regulatory framework applicable to cryptocurrency and other digital asset investment funds (“digital asset funds”) offered to U.S. investorsand how those regulatory considerations affect fund structuring decisions.

This 24-page report by Cascadia Capital provides a helpful snapshot of different facets of the pet industry.

Insurance Linked Securities (ILS) have experienced significant interest from investors over the last 20 years. ILS investments have generally been in catastrophe bonds (cat bonds). Anoth-er equally long-standing ILS strategy, private credit for small to mid-sized insurance companies, is the focus of this white paper.

The emergence of third-party (or “alternative”) capital entering the reinsurance market through the use of insurance linked securities (“ILS”) has put a ceiling on reinsurance rates.This has led to a flattening of the reinsurance cycle, whereby large insured catastrophes no longer result in spikes of reinsurance prices. This…

When managing alternative risk premia (ARP) strategies, we think it is important to keep things simple, liquid, transparent, and diversified.

This report provides an overview of the stablecoin ecosystem and the need to improve payment systems and services. It also the regulatory, oversight and policy issues associated with stablecoin initiatives, highlighting the particular challenges inherent in global stablecoins (GSCs). It further provides a preliminary review…

How well can a cryptocurrency serve as a means of payment? Cryptocurrencies need to overcome double spending by using costly mining and by delaying settlement. We formalize this insight through an incentive constraint that rules out double spending and pins down the welfare costs of a cryptocurrency. We find that it is…

Investors are increasingly considering the environmental, social and governance (ESG) properties of their portfolios, say John Seo and Joanna Syroka of Fermat Capital Management. They believe insurance-linked securities (ILS) are aligned with positive ESG attributes which could help protect and enhance portfolio returns.

Investing in water is well-established in Australia where water rights have been unbundled from land and are considered separate property rights. Water rights are freely traded in an open market designed with the dual objectives of economically efficient water use and environmental sustainability. Australia’s water markets…

Libra was presented as a cryptocurrency on June 18, 2019 by Facebook. On the same day, Facebook announced plans for Calibra, a subsidiary in charge of the development of an electronic wallet and financial services. In view of the primary risk of sovereignty posed by the creation of Libra, the Central Banks quickly took very…

Cryptocurrencies have emerged in the last decade as a new asset class unlikely to disappear despite its extraordinary volatility. Futures contracts on Bitcoins were introduced in December 2017 by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and options are being traded on crypto exchanges. Our goal in this paper is threefold: i) present…