Funds
Institutional investors based in Asia-Pacific have allocated more capital to hedge funds in recent years, reaching a record USD202 billion as of the end of 2016, up from USD180 billion a year earlier, according to Preqin’s new Hedge Funds in Asia-Pacific report.
This is at odds with allocation trends in North America and Europe, which in 2016 saw a greater proportion of investors indicate they were seeking to draw back from hedge funds than were looking to increase their investments. The majority of capital invested in hedge funds by Asia-Pacific-based investors comes from sovereign wealth funds, while several investors, particularly
StarCompliance, a provider of enterprise compliance and regulatory software solutions for the financial services industry, has secured an investment from Luminate Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based private equity firm, to support its global growth strategy.
StarCompliance’s software platform helps financial services institutions manage, prevent, detect, report and resolve employee conflicts of interest by providing an unmatched 360-degree view of employee activity across the enterprise. StarCompliance’s platform monitors critical regulated employee activities such as personal trading, gifts and entertainment, political contributions and outside business activities to ensure ongoing compliance and mitigate the operational and reputational risk of non-compliance.
“We are
LeverPoint Management, a full service Fund Administration firm, has acquired Lamplighter Financial. Lamplighter CEO, Brian Woodall, will take on a new role as Director, Business Development.
“We are thrilled that Lamplighter Financial is now a part of LeverPoint,” says David MacPhee (pictured), CEO, LeverPoint. “As we continue to grow and expand our client base across the country, acquisitions like these will be a vital part of the strategic process.”
LeverPoint is a Clifton Park, NY based Fund Administration firm that offers full service fund accounting, tax and back office support within the alternative investment sector. LeverPoint allows Fund Managers
Two new European indices for blue chips – the Morningstar Eurozone 50 Index and Morningstar Developed Markets Europe 100 Index – are now live on Euronext.
The indices developed by Euronext and Morningstar aim to provide different investor profiles (asset managers, brokers, ETF issuers, banks and trading desks) with equity beta indices that can be used as benchmarks and for investable product creation. The new indices are positioned as a competitive alternative to Europe’s existing offerings and are part of Morningstar’s Open Indexes Project, which delivers a portion of Morningstar’s global equity indices for no cost to the investment community
New York-based hedge fund firm Gondor Capital Management’s two hedge funds again edged their benchmarks with double-digit returns in the first half of 2017, consistently outperforming the S&P 500.
Gondor’s domestic hedge fund Gondor Partners, LP jumped 11.90 per cent through June (+2.02 per cent MTD), while the offshore Gondor Partners, Ltd., finished the first six months of the year up 10.36 per cent (+1.68 per cent MTD). Comparatively, the S&P 500 rose 9.34 per cent in the first half of the year while the HFRX was up 3.73 per cent during the same period.
“The strategy I use
Global fiduciary and administration services provider Estera has acquired Headstart, a specialist corporate and trust services business in Luxembourg.
The transaction paves the way for Estera’s expansion into Luxembourg, one of world’s most important jurisdictions for funds and corporate services, while also broadening the company’s offering in corporate, fund and trust services.
Headstart’s Managing Directors, Christophe Gaul and Manuel Mouget, will continue to lead the business. The company, whose clients include private equity and real estate firms, institutional clients, corporates and high net worth individuals, will rebrand to Estera in September 2017.
Farah Ballands (pictured), CEO of Estera,
JP Morgan has launched a new agency pass-through securities index, the JP Morgan MBS Agency Index (MAX) which is designed to act as an efficient and in-depth measure of the US MBS market’s largest and most traded fixed-rate agency programs.
In this all-encompassing benchmark, JP Morgan combines 30-year, 15-year and now 20-year MBS in an index containing 404 aggregates that cover almost 85 per cent of the US agency market (as of June 30, 2017). The MAX index reduces tracking error by reflecting monthly agency factor updates from the 6th business day of the month, compared to delays until the
Against the backdrop of the current macroeconomic environment, Howie Li (pictured), CEO, Canvas, ETF Securities, is encouraging investors to think deeply about future proofing their portfolios.
“The unconventional policy steps which central banks took from 2008 onwards has had knock-on effects to the valuation of assets and this continues to create big challenges for investors. At the beginning of the year, investors were concerned about inflation, how much longer the equity markets could continue to perform strongly and about Brexit as well as geopolitical risk generally. Not much has changed over the year but these remain drivers for uncertainty at
The new BMO Enhanced Equity Income ETFs range is a first for passive investors says Christine Cantrell (pictured), sales director, ETFs, at BMO Global Asset Management. The strategy brings an institutional approach to investing, available in an ETF format, with broad equity benchmarks at its core and an option overlay for additional yield.
“I am excited because these are so unique,” Cantrell says. “They haven’t been done before in the UCITS ETF structure but it is a tried and tested approach because we are already leaders in a similar strategy in Canada.”
Canadian headquartered BMO has GBP23.5 billion assets under management
The ETF industry has enjoyed another extraordinary year of asset gathering. At the end of June 2017, there were 1,830 US exchange traded funds with assets of USD2,886 billion according to the latest monthly overview of the US ETF market by Ultumus. Assets in the iShares Core products MSCI EAFE ETF, S&P 500 ETF and US Agg Bond ETF all experienced strong inflows during the month of June, attracting in excess of USD2 billion each along with the SPDR Fin Sel Sector ETF.
Assets in US fixed income ETFs saw gains of over USD4 billion for the month, while the
