Funds
Cowen Prime Services, the prime services division of Cowen Group, has been named Best Global Prime Broker at the 2017 Hedgeweek Global Awards.
This is the second consecutive year that Hedgeweek has honoured Cowen Prime Services with this award.
The Hedgeweek Global Awards celebrate excellence among hedge fund managers and service providers and celebrates the achievements of firms that contributed to another significant year for the sector. The winners, who were presented with their awards in London on 3 March, were decided by a poll of Hedgeweek readers, who include both investors and managers as well as other industry professionals at
Close to three quarters of investors expect their hedge fund portfolios to perform better in 2017 versus 2016, according to Deutsche Bank’s 15th annual Alternative Investment Survey.
Performance-based gains are expected to drive industry assets to reach USD3.14 trillion by year-end, says Deutsche Bank’s poll of 460 hedge fund investors representing almost USD2 trillion in hedge fund assets.
The survey reveals that 2016 marked another year in which significant return dispersion shaped hedge fund performance. On average, investors’ top quartile funds returned 11.22 per cent in 2016, while respondents’ bottom quartile managers were down 6.86 per cent.
Manager
Hedge funds extended recent gains in February, as global equity markets rallied and all main strategies produced broad-based gains, led by equity hedge funds specialising in healthcare and technology.
The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index (FWC) advanced 1.0 per cent for the month, the 11th monthly gain in the trailing 12 months, bringing YTD 2017 performance to 2.2 per cent.
February extends the HFRI FWC Index Value to 13,241, the third consecutive monthly record, according to data released by HFR.
The HFRI Asset Weighted Composite Index posted a slightly higher return of +1.2 per cent for the month,
The Tribeca Global Natural Resources Fund has been ranked the number one performing hedge fund in all strategies globally in the 2017 Preqin Global Hedge Fund report.
The fund is a long/short global natural resources fund focusing on large liquid opportunities in equities, credit and commodities. The fund’s investible universe includes hard rock commodities, energy, soft commodities and the service providers and infrastructure that wrap around these three groups.
Ben Cleary (pictured), co-portfolio manager, says 2017 is also looking to be a promising year for the fund.
“Despite a broad based selloff in global bonds, the Trump presidency and
Alcentra, the alternative fixed income specialist of BNY Mellon Investment Management, has held the final close of its second European direct lending fundraising.
This fundraising has brought recent commitments to EUR4.3 billion across funds and separately managed accounts. The firm’s committed capital for the strategy now exceeds EUR5.7 billion.
The fundraising is part of the broader direct lending strategy that Alcentra has been offering to institutional investors since 2003. To date, Alcentra has invested over EUR5.3 billion in middle market companies across senior debt, unitranche, second-lien, mezzanine and equity investments.
Alcentra has been sourcing and arranging financings to
London-based Garraway Capital Management has announced that it is to build on its strong 2016 performance with a programme designed to build its assets. Its Irish UCITS fund, Garraway Financial Trends, was launched in 2012, becoming a ‘pure’ UCITS strategy in February 2014.
The firm writes that the fund employs a proprietary systematic trend-following strategy to trade across global UCITS-eligible exchange-traded futures, including currencies, stock indices and government bonds.
Darran Goodwin (pictured), Fund Manager of Garraway Financial Trends, says: “After a solid three-year track record trading its current strategy and excellent performance in 2016, we are now at the stage
Agecroft Partners has been named as Best Third Party Marketer Firm at the Hedgeweek Global Awards 2017 – the sixth time in seven years that the company has won the award.
“We are honoured to have won this award and more importantly we are happy that the market place approves of the job we are doing,” says Agecroft’s founder Don Steinbrugge (pictured).
Agecroft’s five partners, who average over 20 years of industry experience, have helped raise tens of billions in assets over their careers and have changed the model of hedge fund third party marketing.
Most third party
STOXX, the operator of Deutsche Boerse Group’s index business, and a global provider of tradable index concepts, has launched the STOXX Climate Impact and STOXX Climate Awareness Indices.
This next generation of low carbon indices incorporates the CDP climate change scoring methodology which evaluates companies based on their progress in the transition towards a low carbon economy.
The STOXX Global Climate Impact ex Global Compact, Controversial Weapons, Tobacco Index has been licensed to the Finnish Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company (Varma) for benchmarking purposes. This index includes only companies that show strong environmental stewardship as they have climate actions
According to the data from Societe Generale Prime Services February was a strong month for managed futures strategies, with all three CTA indices (the CTA index, the CTA mutual fund index and the Trend index) producing performance in excess of 2 per cent.
Trend followers led this positive turnaround, returning 2.88 per cent. Short term traders, on the other hand, continued to struggle, with negative returns of -1.95 per cent.
The Trend Indicator attribution data showed that equity indices, contributing 2.30 per cent, were the main driver of positive returns for trend followers in February with gains from long positions
Event-driven hedge fund performance has continued to move upwards over recent weeks in a context where M&A activity has remained strong since the beginning of the year, especially in the US, according to Lyxor’s latest Hedge Fund Weekly Brief.
Lyxor writes that according to Dealogic, global M&A activity has reached USD490 billion year to date (YTD) as of 3 March.
Although global M&A volumes are slightly down compared to the same period last year (-7 per cent), this is mainly related to lower dealmaking in Asia (-36 per cent, including Japan).
M&A volumes are up 6 per cent
