Funds
Jose Castellano has joined iM Global Partner as deputy CEO and Head of International Business Development.
iM Global Partner is an investment and development asset management platform focused on acquiring strategic investments in traditional and alternative investment firms, its Partners, with an objective of growing together. iM Global Partner aims to cover a wide spectrum of high alpha strategies globally supporting its present and future top-of-the-range managers.
iM Global Partner, which opened a distribution platform in the United States mid-2018, is now accelerating its international business development’s resources for its Partners.
Castellano (pictured), will support the continuous build-up
The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index, which provides a representative baseline for how the broad liquid alternative investment category performs, returned -1.59 per cent in December, outperforming the -1.93 per cent monthly return of the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index.
The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index family is a joint offering between Wilshire Funds Management, the global investment management business unit of Wilshire Associates Incorporated, and Wilshire Analytics, creator of the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index.
“Fourth quarter observed a sharp reversal of sentiment following the market’s concerns of a less accommodative monetary policy and strained trade relations abroad,” says
Following a challenging October and November, CTAs ended the year with positive performance, with the SG CTA Index up by 1.44 per cent and the SG Trend Index up 0.94 per cent in December.
However, the YTD figures were in negative territory and 2018 has been the most difficult year for the CTA Index and Trend Index on record. The SG Short-Term Traders Index reported positive performance as it was up +3.50 per cent in December and +1.96 per cent YTD.
The SG Trend Indicator showed that there were gains in equities and bonds, however, currencies contributed negative performance
Operational Due Diligence (ODD) specialist firms HedgeAssist and Catalina Partners merged on 1 January 2019.
The combined firms’ professionals, Arne Rovell, Patricia Watters, and Michelle Kline, provide a breadth of operational knowledge, legal and audit expertise, and investigative skills gained over their 64 years of combined industry experience to investors in, and managers of, alternative investment funds.
According to Rovell, gaps in an investment manager’s operational processes and third-party oversight translates into operational risk.
“Our services help investors couple their investment risk analysis with our ODD process in order to better assess total risk,” says Rovell. “We also
The global hedge fund industry ended a volatile 2018 in the red, with aggregate performance for December at -2.15 per cent and for the year at -4.86 per cent, according to the latest eVestment hedge fund performance data.
December’s negative performance marked the industry’s fifth consecutive month of negative performance in 2018.
The industry’s aggregate negative performance for 2018 was nearly on par with the industry’s second worst year on record, 2011, when returns came in at -4.99 per cent. The hedge fund industry’s worst annual performance on record came in at -15.75 per cent back in 2008.
Sterling Partners Quantitative Investments (SPQI), an investment manager specialising in a variety of quantitative alternative investment strategies, has launched its Equity Market Neutral Strategy.
SPQI is an affiliate of Sterling Partners (Sterling), a diversified investment management firm based in Chicago.
The Equity Market Neutral Strategy employs a diversified, market neutral, long-short equity strategy and uses systematic, quantitative methods to extract edge that is rooted in companies’ financial fundamentals. The strategy is based on its founders’ experience developing statistical trading and investing strategies.
The strategy is led by Chief Investment Officer Chris Dardanes, Chief Operating Officer Michael Schmitt, and
RJ O’Brien Financial, an affiliate of independent futures brokerage and clearing firm RJ O’Brien & Associates (RJO), has launched its over-the-counter (OTC) Agricultural Structured Products Group.
Designed for commercial agricultural firms of all sizes across the globe, the bilateral OTC initiative utilises a first-of-its-kind proprietary software platform developed by the team’s financial engineers to analyse client needs and then generate and quote a wide range of customised hedging strategies.
Leading the team is Melisa Culbertson (pictured), Executive Director and Senior Vice President, OTC Structured Products, formerly an independent floor and electronic grains trader with more than 25 years of
Chris Galizio, a former portfolio manager at Fidelity Institutional Asset Management (FIAM), has connected with LHA Ventures as portfolio manager and seed investor in the LHA Focused Long-Short Fund.
After a nearly thirteen-year career at Pioneer Investments and a ten-year run co-managing institutional assets at FIAM where, during his tenure, assets peaked at over USD7 billion, Galizio (pictured), has made the decision to broaden his investment horizons and manage a long-short US equity fund.
Galizio said: “I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the many years spent at Fidelity finding good companies in which to invest. At this stage of my
AIMA and CAIA are proposing a new system to help reduce the complexity of current methods of risk ratings at investment dealer firms.
The Associations have published guidelines on these methods in response to new regulations and consistent feedback from AIMA member firms that retail risk ratings unfairly rate alternative products automatically as high risk.
The final amendments to regulation NI 81-102 will make alternative investment funds available to retail investors. This has the potential to expand the market for alternative investment products that were previously only available to accredited investors. Consequently, some early predictions anticipate the Canadian alternative
The end of the year remained challenging for L/S Equity, suffering in sympathy with plunging equity markets, according to the first Weekly Brief of 2019 from Lyxor’s Cross Asset Research team. L/S Credit strategies were also caught up by widening credit spreads.
In contrast, CTAs and Global Macro strategies outperformed, defensively positioned. Attractive in a bearish scenario, they are vulnerable to a market mean- reversion, if any.
Hedge fund performance was negative in Q4. Strategies with equity market exposure such as L/S Equity and Special Situations underperformed. Their elevated weighting in global hedge fund indices dragged the performance of
