Where Michael Novogratz is seeking alpha

Emerging markets could offer the best bet for investors seeking aggressive returns, Michael Novogratz said Wednesday.

Novogratz, who oversees $4 billion in assets as principal at Fortress Investment Group, said that the U.S. economy has made it tough to find alpha stateside.

"Delivering alpha has been difficult in the macro space here," he said. "Volatility's at an all-time low. The 10-year interest rate hasn't really moved plus or minus 15 basis points all year. When policymakers are on hold and haven't started shifting, it continues to create lower volatility, more notional risk in the system."

Named "Hedge Fund Manager of the Year" in 2013 by Institutional Investor, Novogratz said that he was looking at "areas where there has been a regime shift or reform, especially in places where markets have spent long periods of … having the blues."

Some of the economies on Novogratz's list include India, Brazil, Argentina and Japan, where he suggested there appeared to be room for additional growth.

"Last year, Japan went up 60 percent. And we made the mistake this year after a 5 percent correction, thinking, 'Oh, the market's corrected. Let's jump back in,'" he said. "Reality is, Japan's had a 15-percent correction after a 60-percent move. It's consolidated for a while, and now you're seeing the Japanese domestic investors come back in and start to buy."

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Novogratz, who made the comments at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York, presented by CNBC and Institutional Investor, also weighed in on Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen's testimony on Tuesday.

"She believes in the secular stagnation of our economy, that we are going to be slow-growth for a long time," he said, adding that the Fed has a plan to raise interest rates "very slowly and not very high."

"Mike Tyson's got a great line: Everyone's got a plan until you hit them in the face," he added.

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Novogratz added that he didn't think the Fed was necessarily creating undue risk because of the likelihood of stagnant U.S. growth.

"We're creating jobs in the U.S., and a lot of them. But we're creating crappy jobs, not well-paying jobs. We're a little bit stuck in this," he said.

Novogratz also alluded to comments Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors made at the conference.

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"One of the big deals out there is this income-distribution gap," he said. "We don't have enough middle-class people that can afford to buy the Fords. And I think that's holding down the overall economy growth."

— By CNBC's Bruno J. Navarro