I've noticed JHQAX (several others mentioned it) a while ago.
This fund seems to offer appealing risk/reward characteristics and it's less expensive than many "alt" funds.

And, JHQAX has successfully proven its mettle over the past 9 years by "providing smoother returns by tempering downside and upside returns via a systematically implemented options strategy".
Of course, it obviously all depends on your personal goals. At this stage of my life, I prefer to err on the side of caution since I don't need a lot more money.
Hence, I prefer to invest in a fund like JHQAX which had a total return of 8.2%, and a modest standard deviation of 8.6%, over the past 5 years. Whereas SPY, for example, gained 12.2%, but had a significantly higher standard deviation of 18.7%.
I find that sleeping well at night is more important to my wellbeing than making a lot of money.
Fred

Buffer Fund
A well-known bit of derivatives magic — a great, simple party trick that derivatives structurers can use to impress their friends — is that if you give me $100 today, I can invest $91 of it in two-year Treasury notes paying 4.75% interest, and in two years I will have $100. And I can invest the other $9 in two-year at-the-money call options on the S&P 500 stock index, options that gain value if the S&P goes up over those two years. Those options cost, let’s say, 13% of the price of the S&P today, so spending $9 on options will get me an option on about $70 worth of the index. And so I can offer you the following trade:
• You give me $100 today.
• In two years, I give you back (1) $100, no matter what, plus (2) 70% of the return on the S&P 500 index, if it’s up.
If stocks go up, you get the gains (well, 70% of them). If stocks go down, you don’t get the losses. What a great trade!
And because I can do this efficiently in size, and because I thought of it and you didn’t, and because I advertised it to you with a cool brochure, I can charge you like 1% of your money for putting this trade together. It is a very good trade, honestly. If you are a sophisticated investor you can quibble with it, but at a simple intuitive level it is just nice. “You get [much of] the upside of stocks, but no downside” is a clean and satisfying pitch. The shape of the payoff graph is pleasing.
Bloomberg’s Vildana Hajric and Emily Graffeo report:

The pioneer of the world’s first “buffer ETFs” — exchange-traded funds that are supposed to limit losses during market selloffs — has launched a new product which it says offers investors complete downside protection.
Investors in the $7.5 trillion ETF universe can now put money behind the Innovator Equity Defined Protection ETF, which began trading under the ticker TJUL on Tuesday. The offering comes from Innovator Capital Management, which launched the first so-called buffer ETFs, also sometimes referred to as defined-outcome funds, in 2018.
Buffer funds, as the name suggests, offer buffered exposure to stocks by limiting investors’ downside risk while also capping upside potential. …
Yet, Innovator says that its TJUL fund — which will track S&P 500 returns up to a capped percentage over a two-year period — will be the first of its kind to protect against 100% of stock losses. TJUL’s cap on potential gains is estimated at about 15% after fees.
Specifically, the fund will invest at least 80% of its net assets in options on the $423 billion SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (ticker SPY), according to the fund’s prospectus. TJUL can purchase and sell a combination of call and put options in an effort to cushion against market volatility.
The outcomes set by the fund may only be realized by investors who continuously hold shares of TJUL from the first day of the “outcome period” — July 18 — to the end of the two-year period, which is June 30, 2025, reads the prospectus.

They give you 100% of the gains up to the cap, rather than 70% of uncapped gains, but same basic idea.
There is a reason that this product is the first of its kind: If interest rates are zero, I can’t invest $91 in Treasuries to get back $100, so I don’t have $9 to spend on options to get S&P 500 upside. (I have to put, like, $99 in Treasuries, and the only way to get you any meaningful upside is by giving you some downside risk too.) But as interest rates have gone up, products like this look better, and so people are offering them.
Of course as interest rates have gone up, products like this are in some sense less attractive: Putting up $100 and getting back $100 in two years is worse if I missed out on 4.75% interest than it would be if interest rates were zero. But that’s not the point! The point is that a trade like “I will give you some stock upside and take 75% of the downside between down 5% and down 20% blah blah blah” is annoying and complicated, while “I will give you the upside of stocks and you can’t lose any money” is nice and simple and intuitively attractive. “Buffer fund” is complicated, “stock fund but you can’t lose money” has an obvious appeal.

I have spent years looking for hedging, and shorting funds, starting with AQR. I could not find any consistent fund that can do it. A fund can work for several years and then stop working for other years.
My conclusion is that the only thing that works, especially for retirees who have enough is to go to MM in high-risk markets and back to invest when markets are "normal. Sure, it's called timing. Timing doesn't have to be perfect, just good, just like investing isn't. All you got to do is come up with a system and try, if it does not work then stop.
Here is another point that many miss. Missing the worst days is better than missing the best days.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/timing-the-market-pays-off-buy-and-hold-51588186928
So here’s the full truth, according to data from Ned Davis Research. From 1979 to mid-April of 2020, the S&P 500 Total Return Index gained 11.23% per annum. Sure, if you missed the best 40 days, returns shrunk to 5.21%. How about if you missed the worst 40 days? Nobody ever talks about that, because you’d be accused of market timing. Guess what? Your returns would soar to 18.83% annually. And importantly, if you missed both the best and the worst 40 days, you actually beat the market at 12.39%.
FD: and more importantly, the portfolio risk-adjusted return is much better too.
Read the following
https://www.cambriainvestments.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Where-the-Black-Swans-Hide-the-10-Best-Days-Myth.pdf
Conclusions:
1. The stock market historically has gone up about two-thirds of the time.
2. All of the stock market return occurs when the market is already uptrending.
3. The volatility is much higher when the market is declining.
4. Most of the best and worst days occur when the market is already declining because markets are much riskier than models assuming normal distributions predict.
5. The reason markets are more volatile when declining is because investors use a different part of their brain making money than when losing money.

Here’s a lesson in how not to invest. I’d played around with DraftKings stock (DKNG) for a couple years. “In and out” / “In and out” as it fell from $45 down to under $11. Fortunately, I managed to break even. Not without a lot of effort. Than in January I bought a pretty big slug of it for $11 which was near its all time low. I vowed to hang on. But when it got up to around $14 by month’s end the “chicken” in me took hold and I cashed out for the $3 per share gain. Today, the stock sits near $31. So I’d have nearly tripled my $$ by hanging on 6 more months. If you want to make $$, buy something you believe in that’s badly beaten up and hang on for the long term.
PS - I don’t any longer post specific holdings or buys / sells. Thought the lesson worth sharing.

In 2022 I was one who tried using BLNDX/REMIX, a fund that engages in L/S trading of stock indices, FI, currencies, and commodities. The managers’ monthly reports are quite detailed regarding how their positions fared over the previous 30 days and what new positions have been initiated. The fund measures itself against 50% MSCI World Index and 50% either the BAML 3-Month Index (bonds) or the SG Trend Index and touts itself as an all-weather vehicle. It has only a four-year history. Here are some numbers from the latest monthly missive.
Year to Date 1-Year Since Inception
BLNDX 4.88% 3.05% 12.68%
REMIX 4.82% 2.86% 12.42%
50% MSCI World Index & 50% BAML 3-Month Index 8.85% 11.38% 5.50%
50% MSCI World Index & 50% SG Trend Index 7.78% 9.00% 11.12%
Once all the dust had settled, my sense is that I would have done much better to go to cash other than try to buy an alternative fund to protect my portfolio. IOW, I did not make any money from my positions in REMIX. As someone else pointed out, one would need a sizable position established before the terrible downturn in stocks and bonds in order to have a positive effect. The position would have had to be big and it had to be early. That’s a tough order to fill. I have never tried shorting any asset, so I can’t report on that.

@WABAC: I have hung on to FIW with no regrets. Of the « theme » ETFs I own or have owned, PAVE held up the best during 2022. The ones I sold don’t get mentioned.

PAVE looks like a good one. I'm all booked up on infrastructure with GLIFX. I was able to upgrade to the I share for 45 bucks at Fidelity. The expense ratio is .97 vice 1.22. First dividend paid the fee. It doesn't shoot the lights out. And it has been going through a rough patch lately. But it helps me sleep at night.

”Stay away from it. If possible.”
Yes. Stay away from timing. Agree.
But stay away from considering relative valuations? No. Asset valuations fluctuate over time. To some extent, herd mentality plays a part. None of us has a crystal ball in that regard either. But part of being an investor - professional or retail - is trying to assess relative valuations, be it in large-cap stocks, small-cap, EM or developed global markets.
There was, I think, a lot of “timing” going on in the retail sector in mid ‘22 - a mere 10 months ago. Many unloaded equities due to predictions of approaching recession. Here is an intriguing MFO thread from September, 2022. Pretty typical of the prevailing retail tenor of the day. Where was the buoyant optimism of today back than?
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/153670/#Comment_153670
- One comment: ”I think you have to be worried that it will take five years for stocks to recover.”
- Another: ”Gloomy now, just think how bad it would be if we were in a *recession*”
- Another: ”Ty for the heads up. Not sure what to do now - wait w cash /buy more CDs hoping crisis will pass.”
- And from the excerpted NYT passage: ”Mr. Tangen, of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, said that he did not think there was an investment area anywhere in the world likely to make money in the near future. ‘That’s the really depressing thing,’ he said.”
The NYT article, which the distinguished @Old_Joe posted at the top of that thread, is dated Sept. 16, 2022. Below is a link to the closing averages for that day. Would you rather buy the S&P back than at 3873 or today at 4555? https://www.coastalwealthmanagement24.com/the-markets-as-of-market-close-friday-september-16-2022/
Despite the air of pessimism running through the thread, a number of posters did see a buying opportunity. @LewisBraham, for one, suggested it might possibly be a good time to buy equities - and made exquisitely good sense as usual. @Junkster mentioned that HY might be a good buy.
Deciding what to own / what to hedge (if anything) relates to assessing relative valuations. I claim no particular acumen in that regard. Just saying, timing aside (don’t do it), there is always the more critical question of relative valuations to consider.

Did I ever tell you the daily prayer of the Wall Street options trader who used to express gratitude to the retail investors trading options while he dropped off his children at private schools on the upper east side costing 65000 a year ?

@hank,
JPM discloses JHQAX hedging strategy in detail on their website. My recollection is the Puts & Calls are against indices, likely S&P 500. It is not a black box fund. You can read on their website and feel free to correct me. (JEPIX - not a subject of this thread writes calls primarily against its position if I recall correctly. The same team manages both.)

Hedging in the classical sense means protecting against (major) losses - think insurance.
The "protective put" mentioned above is a good example and can be analogized to collision insurance. You pay for collision insurance (a stock put). Without insurance, if your car is totaled (stock price plummets), you're stuck with salvage value (severely depressed stock price). With insurance, you get back a fair percentage of the car value (stock purchase price).
One speaks of "hedging one's bets". Merriam-Webster defines this as doing "things that will prevent great loss or failure if future events do not happen as one plans or hopes." It gives the example: "They decided to hedge their bets by putting half their money in stocks and the other half in bonds."
That's hedging, or insurance. You're paying something (opportunity cost of greater stock earnings) to protect against greater losses (100% equity exposure in a market crash).
So one answer to the original question is: everyone hedges, though most probably don't think of asset allocation as hedging.
Unfortunately (IMHO), "hedging" has become synonymous with any tinkering with risk, whether to decrease it, to increase it, or to shift it from one security (or asset class) to another.
Worried about TMSRX, that has 29% in equity shorts (net 15% short position), and 47% in fixed income shorts (net 12% long), per M*? A mere trifle. PIMIX / PONAX, a fund lauded here, has129% in fixed income shorts (net 188% long), and has 222% in cash shorts (net 89% short) suggesting a lot of leverage. Figures from M*.
The trick is to know (a) why the manager is hedging (for protection or profit or both), and (b) how the heding is done (i.e. how is the risk profile being altered). ISTM knowing the first is possible (from manager statements, fund behavior) but knowing the second is difficult. Hence a natural aversion to "excessive" hedging.

update:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/915802/000139834423013179/fp0084407-1_497.htm
497 1 fp0084407-3_497.htm
FINANCIAL INVESTORS TRUST
Grandeur Peak Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Contrarian Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Explorer Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Micro Cap Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Opportunities Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Reach Fund
Grandeur Peak Global Stalwarts Fund
Grandeur Peak International Opportunities Fund
Grandeur Peak International Stalwarts Fund
Grandeur Peak US Stalwarts Fund
(each, a “Fund”)
Supplement dated July 17, 2023
To the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and Statement of Additional Information,
each dated August 31, 2022, as supplemented
The Funds’ Reorganization date, as previously announced in the Supplement dated June 16, 2023 to the Funds’ Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI, has been extended to on or about October 6, 2023.
For additional information regarding the Funds’ Reorganization, see the Supplement dated June 16, 2023 to the Funds’ Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI.
*********
Please retain this supplement with your Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and Statement of Additional Information.

update:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/915802/000139834423013179/fp0084407-1_497.htm
497 1 fp0084407-1_497.htm
FINANCIAL INVESTORS TRUST
Rondure New World Fund
Rondure Overseas Fund
(each, a “Fund”)
Supplement dated July 17, 2023
To the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and Statement of Additional Information,
each dated August 31, 2022, as supplemented
The Funds’ Reorganization date, as previously announced in the Supplement dated June 16, 2023 to the Funds’ Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI, has been extended to on or about October 6, 2023.
For additional information regarding the Funds’ Reorganization, see the Supplement dated June 16, 2023 to the Funds’ Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI.
*********
Please retain this supplement with your Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and Statement of
Additional Information.

Thanks @MikeM
I’m looking at JHQAX right now thru my subscription to the FT. It shows 97.6% long U.S. equity, 1.82% long non-U.S. equity. No shorts. Top 5 equities: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet. Those 5 comprise over 23% of portfolio. All 5 of those stocks, except Amazon, have gained over 30% the past 1 year. And Nvidia is up 200% over that time. So, how that fund hedges is a mystery looking at the chart. I imagine it sells buys puts on its holdings. Pretty common practice. Giroux was big into that several years ago. But don’t know about today.
Re Nvidia, I noticed the other day it was one of the top 2 or 3 holdings in PRPFX. The fund does invest in “aggressive growth stocks.” So I guess it struck “gold” with that one.
Don’t know about Schwab’s site. But Fido’s analytical tool will show short positions as a % of any asset you own and subtract that sum to display your “net” long equity position. Good tool. Shows me 50% equity long, 8% short for a net 42% equities, Sounds about right considering all my holdings plus a 1.5% short position (SPDN) I initiated directly yesterday. Interestingly, it also shows a small (4%) short position in short term bonds. Possibly one of my alternatives has figured out how to do that.

I hold JHQAX, JPMorgan Hedged Equity Fund. I bought in over 2 years ago and have added to it to a point where it is about 10% of my portfolio. We've talked about this fund before and I guess I really can't explain very well the put-call spread collar strategy it uses. I only know it moves with the S&P500 with a much smoother ride. As a hedge fund, it's a way of participating in the equity markets at much less volatility. It just rolls along making money when the market is going up and losing much less when the market declines (upside capture ratio ~51%, downside ~36%.)... FWIW.

Update, 7/18/23
Thanks for all the well wishes and prayers for recovery.
Current Score: YBB 1, Pneumonia 0.
I just completed a 5-day course of a strong antibiotics. It didn’t do much for 3 days – that was disheartening at one point. But then, things improved dramatically. Full recovery will take time. I would have to be cautious about a relapse. I will also think about where and how I caught a sudden pneumonia that literally knocked me out – almost.
I had all the pneumonia shots PPSV-23, Prevnar-13. Now they have a combo/single vaccine, and at some point, I may have that too – this current infection should cause natural immunity for a good while.
Thanks to Capital at Big Bang, @ceciljk at MFO, @eceprof at M* for posting information at those discussion boards.

@WABAC: ISTM that at the time you mentioned buying TAN, you also spoke of GRID. That was a great pick, up some 38% the last year. QCLN and ICLN, also clean energy themed, have both failed to put up exciting numbers.

GRID has been great. FIW hasn't been bad either. Both are small holdings in the IRA, but may get a little love going forward. And I'm also thinking about EVX. But not for the IRA. :)
I'll will be looking to dump ICLN as soon as possible. It too goes sideways. It's around 45% utilities. It gets little juice from Tesla. Electric cars are great, I suppose. But vehicles are still consumer items. So I take that segment with a grain of salt if hot returns are based on vehicles.

har and cool, comical and astounding
There's a big honkin' footnote for Great Owls, M*, Lipper, Zacks ....
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/2117450/4-balanced-mutual-funds-to-buy-for-stability-in-uncertain-times
https://www.morningstar.com/asset-management-companies/state-farm-BN00000A2N
All as casual as I in their labor.
(Maybe some do catch that exclusion, as I am being casual here too.)

I never was good at hedging. Sure, I'd put an option hedge of some sort on and be proven right, but since the position likely expired before the event, it meant that I was early, and thus 'wrong.' :)
Ergo, since I'm usually a lousy market timer, if I do get really worried, I'll either move into cash, lighten up a position, or write some covered calls...but usually stay in the game. FWIW saying, I do use option collars too -- I have one that I established when starting a large income position right now that's doing just fine (stock bought at $35, collared at 30 and 40).

@hank
Question for you sir. In your opinion is shorting, long short more of a psychological approach to keep you invested? Very difficult to get right, timing and all, have to be right, hard to know when the central banks step in , psychology of market participants....hussman makes so much rational sense, makes money when market turns down but then gives it back and goes nowhere in an interesting way as you alluded to
My perspective after never winning long term by shorting is to never expose to the markets more than 6 to 9 months of salary, work compensation if the sp500 drew down by 50%. Ya very conservative but compounds the portfolio very well.
Another way to satisfy the shorting Jones might be to be in a fund like velix which does short somewhat and opportunistically or maybe fpacx which can have an eclectic approach and keep you invested through a down flush in the markets
Annual average return can fool a lot of folks....start go up 50% and then down 50%. Average over two years is 0% return but you're actually down 25%.. from where you started. Compounding your wealth is important and if shorting prevents the big flush or keeps you from being to aggressive might work...
Best regards
Baseball fan

Anyway, Crash, I hope you find what you're looking for...

As mentioned once or twice, above, the best candidate looks to be RPBAX now.