Ten years ago, Pascal Gallo, a French researcher with a fresh doctorate in physics from Toulouse University embarked on a new journey at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). During his postdoctorate studies, he began the first experiments on technologies related to growing synthetic diamonds. Later, in 2015, he founded LakeDiamond, a start-up located at the EPFL Innovation Park specializing in lab-grown diamonds. According to LakeDiamond, these lab-grown diamonds have unique properties. Among others, they are "transparent to light, conductors of heat, eco-friendly, chemically inert, hard and elastic and biocompatible" (LakeDiamond -Summary fact sheet, October 2018), a set of characteristics that sounds extraordinary. Diamonds are used in a variety of fields, from medicine and telecommunications to computer sciences. Industrial demand is there; supply, however, has been lacking. The manufacturing process relies on complex machinery, where layers of carbon are deposited in a crystalline pattern to gradually shape a fully lab-grown diamond. The process is done in reactors that are extremely costly to manufacture. LakeDiamond owned two of these, and intended to acquire fifty more in the next five years if the company could obtain the financing. With a limited number of reactors, the fifteen thousand plates of diamonds produced per year would not have been sufficient to finance such a rapid expansion of the company. Although opportunities were available, the heavy cost of the reactors and the low productivity of the manufacturing process hindered company growth. Under these circumstances, raising capital was the priority for Gallo and his associates, as is often the case when start-ups wish to expand. A decision was then made to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) using the relatively new and still emerging distributed ledger technology (DLT) known popularly as "blockchain" or "Bitcoin" (more below).As economies digitalize and many local businesses gradually internationalize, crowdfunding platforms have offered a new way for ventures to raise capital. Relying on distributed ledger technology (DLT, blockchain), the method of "tokenization" now seems to be the next way for digital economics to be actualised in practise. Digitalizing some of the production and selling processes through crypto-tokenization technology has brought with it new perspectives and opportunities. Any thorough consideration of the logic of "distributed systems" applied to economics is bound to see that it potentially brings considerable disruptions and significant changes in how companies get access to funding. Cryptocurrencies, and subsequently "tokens" initially issued from "initial coin offerings" (ICOs) have answered an obvious need for efficient, borderless, and secure flows of capital. This article first summarizes what early academic research tells us about ICOs based on DLTs and their factors of success. We then use the case of LakeDiamond, a Swiss venture in the business of growing and polishing synthetic diamonds, to pr...

Because of their overreliance on benchmark tracking, pension funds in Switzerland tend to take a passive and short-term approach to portfolio investment and management. This leads to mismatched and sterile strategy styles in relation to their mandates perspective and needs. Pension funds have a long-term perspective which nevertheless could benefit from more adaptive approaches (for example in seeking to temper the negative effects of the paradigm shift to near-zero interest rates which has plagued performance for several years now). In this study, we aim to explore and understand alternative approaches used by successful market participants. We conducted 9 semi-direct interviews with experts in the field to explore this question and develop research propositions. The key findings are that these talented finance professionals look for weak signals that herald change and they are able to exploit them successfully. We aim to see if there are benefits to incorporating qualitative weak signals into a forward-looking risk management tool to better hedge the portfolios of pension funds that typically rely on more backward-looking approaches. The objective of this research is therefore to apply the concepts of cybernetics to the case of a business investment portfolio solution.

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Evaluating Alternative Risk Premia products as standalone investments is not sufficient to conclude whether these products add value to institutional investors, whose portfolios are largely composed of well-diversified equity and bond allocations, and usually smaller ones to alternative assets. We study whether the inclusion of ARP products adds value to two well-known benchmarks of balanced allocations: the 60/40 world equity/bond portfolio and the Pictet LPP 2015-60 index. Taking a sample of live ARP products from 2016 to May 2021, we find that a systematic allocation to ARP with no equity exposure improves risk-adjusted performance, due to risk reduction, even though it causes a small drag in long-term return. This impact is similar to the one many investors seek in Trend-Following funds or Tail-Hedge products, for which we compare results. The drag in performance disappears if one can dynamically manage the inclusion of ARP into the balanced portfolios, even though market timing ability is at the very least a rare asset.

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