Global Alts New York 2026 – Liquid Alpha, Emerging Managers, and the AI Divide

Two successive panels at the 2026 Global Alts New York conference took on a pair of questions that have dominated allocator conversations for the past two years: whether hedge funds are back as genuine alpha generators, and how limited partners should think about backing the next generation of fund managers in a talent pool that the multi-strategy platform model has reshaped.

Hedge Funds Reset – The Return of Liquid Alpha

The first panel, moderated by Hema Parmar, Senior Investing Reporter at Bloomberg News, brought together four practitioners: John Calcaterra, Senior Portfolio Analyst at Albourne; Shane Sandoval, Managing Director of Public Equities and Head of Technology at Atreides Management; Aaron Weitman, Founder, Managing Partner, and CIO of CastleKnight Management, who previously spent more than fifteen years as a Senior Partner at Appaloosa Management before launching CastleKnight in 2020; and Pieter Fyfer, Portfolio Manager at Arini, the global credit firm founded by Hamza Lemssouguer, where Fyfer joined at inception after a career at Credit Suisse Asset Management.

Credit Compression and the Shift to Negative Convexity

Also see: 2026 Sohn New York Conference: Full Coverage of Einhorn, Bravo, Goodwin, Chanos Pitches

Arini is a long-short credit fund manager with a significant focus on Europe, where Fyfer argued there are meaningfully more pricing inefficiencies than in the US, partly because insolvency  laws vary so widely across European jurisdictions. He noted that Arini has invested heavily in research depth to capture those inefficiencies in a repeatable way.