Funds
Merger arbitrage is proving the most resilient hedge fund strategy amid the continued global volatility sparked by the coronavirus outbreak, according to Lyxor Asset Management.
Merger arb strategies were down just 0.4 per cent since the 18 February equity peak, while a traditional 50/50 equities and bonds portfolio has lost 4.6 per cent, based on the MSCI World and Barclays Global Aggregate Bond indices, up to 3 March, Lyxor strategists observed on Tuesday. The strategy was resilient in a context where deal spreads were stable up to 28th February and widened afterwards.
The recent widening of deal spreads offered opportunities
Close to a third of hedge fund firms have now slashed management and performance fees, according to a new industry study, which suggests managers increasingly must offer discounts and other novel fee models to retain investor mandates.
The report, ‘European Alternative Investments 2020: Matching Different Demands’, published by Cerulli Associates, explores how falling risk-adjusted returns and competition from rival products such as private equity have prompted hedge funds to overhaul their fee structures.
Almost half of the large institutional investors—those with assets of more than EUR15 billion (USD16.8 billion)—surveyed by Cerulli said that they now always receive discounts for onshore
Nasdaq has acquired Solovis, a privately-held financial technology company offering multi-asset class portfolio management, analytics and reporting tools across public and private markets. Solovis solutions will be available through Nasdaq’s eVestment group and broaden eVestment’s capabilities with portfolio analysis and monitoring for institutional investors and consultants.
“Nasdaq’s mission is to provide transparency and data to the financial world, all through modern technology,” says Lauren Dillard, Executive Vice President and head of Nasdaq’s Global information Services Group. “The combination of eVestment and Solovis bolsters our capabilities to serve the investment community. Together, they create a global leader of proprietary content, insights and portfolio analytics.”
Solovis gives sophisticated investors a unified line
Sustainable investing proved to be the biggest structural investment theme for 2020 and beyond at the ninth annual Amsterdam Investor Forum, hosted on 5 February at the headquarters of ABN AMRO Clearing.
Oil prices plummeted on Monday morning as the impact from the coronavirus outbreak – coupled with a Saudi Arabian price cut – dragged global stock markets lower, with a number of major hedge funds standing to gain from the commodities crash.
Brent crude fell to just over USD36 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate was roughly USD32 on Monday morning. Saudi Arabia has sparked a price war by slashing costs, souring relations between Opec and Russia, with the subsequent 30 per cent fall the biggest since the 1991 Gulf War.
Amid hefty slides not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, BP and
Hedge funds posted mixed performance in February, led by fixed income-based Relative Value Arbitrage strategies, as global equities and commodities suffered steep declines on spreading coronavirus contagion fears. The investable HFRI 500 Relative Value Index gained +0.8 per cent for the month, led by arbitrage positions, primarily long fixed income and short equity exposures, as reported today by HFR®, the established global leader in the indexation, analysis and research of the global hedge fund industry.
The broad-based HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index declined -1.7 per cent for the month, topping the steep decline of the DJIA by over 800 basis points.
The impact of the coronavirus outbreak is revealing underlying weaknesses in emerging market debt, according to Man GLG.
Guillermo Ossés, head of emerging market debt strategies at Man GLG, says the firm is staying negative on EM assets until the risk of a pandemic infection from Covid-19 outbreak has subsided.
He predicted a “steep correction” in both the local and external EM indexes driven by EM FX, credit and local rates.
“EM countries have no room to manoeuvre in this environment and positions in EM assets have not been reduced in size. It took just one day worth of outflows,
With notable dispersion in high yield in 2019, CQS and BlueBay Asset Management see further upside as energy and automotive sectors respond to technology disruption…
High yield credit will likely present further idiosyncratic opportunities in 2020 thanks to elevated dispersion in US high yield, in particular. Relative to investment grade, CQS’s Sir Michael Hintze is of the view that “there is room for significant outperformance”.
In the latest CQS Insights research study, “Looking into 2020”, Hintze, the founder and CIO of one of the world’s best known credit hedge funds, thinks there is still some way to go in the
The rapid stock market sell-off – which saw the S&P 500 slide 3 per cent again on Thursday, with the FTSE 100 down 3.5 per cent on Friday morning – is unlikely to end the long equity bull market run, according to Target QR Strategies, the US hedge fund investment adviser.
Portfolio manager Robert Zuccaro believes that while the ongoing concerns over the impact of the coronavirus outbreak may push markets lower “for a while”, the downdraft will be followed by a “strong market recovery”.
Zuccaro – a quantitative investing veteran who focuses on midcap equities – pointed to the
The Standards Board for Alternative Investments (SBAI) has published a memo on addressing potential conflicts of interest between parallel funds, which was developed by the Standards Board’s Governance Working Group.
