INVESTMENT TOPICS

TIFF Education Foundation > Investment Topics > Market Environment

Market Environment

Market environment refers to the behavior of global capital markets and countries as well as to more narrow sectors that may be taken into account when making an investment decision. (Click on the links below to open PDF files in a new browser window.)

Survival of the Fittest: South Africa Lessons on Investing
There are more than a few parallels between what speakers had to say at a pension officers' conference in Cape Town and what wide-eyed tourists espied on the game reserve: there is safety in numbers, overconfidence is to be overcome, expect the unexpected, sloth is a virtue, risk is in the eyes of the beholder.

Thinking About Risk
Many investors have been so conditioned to examine carefully the risks inherent in each investment that they make — to make sure that their downside is tolerable — that they ignore entirely or give short shrift to the important question of whether their upside is adequate.

China Syndrome
There are multiple ways for even the most bullish Sinophiles to profit from the potentially rapid expansion of the Chinese economy without subjecting their capital to the high risk of permanent loss that direct investments in China arguably entail.

Emerging Markets Dugout Speech
Covers interesting facts and figures about emerging markets and discusses whether or not emerging markets is a distinct asset class.

Provocative Panel on Private Investing
Three broad categories are covered: (1) the Internet's impact on corporate strategy and tactics, (2) the Internet's impact on institutional investment strategy and tactics, and (3) the Internet's impact on public policy formulation and implementation.

Fund of Funds Cure or Disease
In the unbiased opinion of the people who run them, funds-of-funds play a vital disciplinary role in the private equity marketplace. They purportedly do this by forcing general partners of the underlying funds in which they invest to do three crucially important things: one, adopt fee structures that make the GPs' interests as congruent as possible with the interests of their limited partners; two, eat their own cooking, so to speak, by investing a substantial portion of their own net worth in their own funds; and three, limit growth in assets under management as well as the number of deals done to levels consistent with their firms' staffing levels and deal flow.

Reflections on US Real Estate
The real estate market can reasonably be divided into two segments: the first includes those areas that cater to the technology industry (San Francisco area, Boston, New York City, west Los Angeles), and the second segment is everything else. In the technology-driven areas, the leasing market is incredibly hot and price insensitive.

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