Funds
Societe Generale Prime Services reports that June was a strong month for most CTA strategies, with the SG CTA Index posting the largest monthly gain since November 2014, and 90 per cent of the constituent programs contributing positive returns.
All CTA indices have finished positively in the month, and complete the first half of the year in positive territory, led by short-term strategies which have returned +5.80 per cent year to date.
The firm writes that performance figures announced last week showed that CTAs weathered Britain’s EU referendum result well, despite mid-month market uncertainty, having benefited from diversification across
Christopher Meyers (pictured), head UK & NL institutional trading at Flow Traders, reports that over the last 18 months, the firm has seen an increase in wealth and asset managers in the UK using ETFs.
Flow Traders is a global principal trading firm, a technology-enabled liquidity provider specialising in ETPs and ETFs. The firm continuously provides liquidity to the major financial markets, quoting prices on more than 95 exchanges and providing bid and ask prices off-exchange to institutional counterparties on a request-for-quote basis.
The recent surge in interest in ETFs by wealth managers is partly due to the ETF providers,
Townsend Lansing (pictured), head of ETCs, ETF Securities reports that the range of investors using exchange traded commodities (ETCs) is broadening to include retail investors. "Interestingly enough in the early days we probably saw predominantly institutional investors using them the most," he says.
"Since 2012, we have seen more and more retail usage, which we measure via trade size. We assume that primary market trades less than USD1 million are direct retail or retail intermediaries. Trades of that size have seen a significant increase, which we take as a representation of increasing interest from this demographic."
Lansing believes that much
The incredible level of market volatility arising from the uncertainty over the UK's referendum vote has caused a great deal of de-risking on the part of investors over recent months.
Chanchal Samadder (pictured), Head of UK and Ireland ETF sales at Lyxor Asset Management says: "The flows we saw last year and at the beginning of this year were into risk assets, equities across the board geographically but now we are experiencing a reversal towards a risk-off downside protection type of environment."
Risk-off has been dominated by fixed income, with investment grade credit in the US proving itself popular with
Last November saw BMO Global Asset Management, part of the Bank of Montreal, open the European arm of its ETF business in London.
Marc Knowles (pictured), director of ETFs, BMO Global Asset Management says: "The Canadian ETF business has been up and running for seven years, gathering USD23 billion of assets across 66 ETFs. Launching and developing the ETF business in Europe is part of the firm's strategy to build a global ETF business."
Since landing in London, the firm has launched nine income orientated ETFs, including five equity 'Income Leader' ETFs which combine two strategies, quality and yield. With
June has seen two events in the ETF calendar organised by firms who have overcome their market competitiveness with each other in favour of educating investors.
The ETF Forum is an independent, UK-based partnership founded by ETF/ETP providers BMO Global Asset Management, ETF Securities, Source in association with Legal & General Investment Management and WisdomTree Europe.
The stated aim of The ETF Forum – which covers not only exchange traded funds (ETFs), but the entire ETP landscape – is to provide advisers and wealth managers with a better understanding of ETFs and how to use them as effective investment tools
BlackRock has launched the UK Strategic Alternative Income Fund, which provides UK defined benefit (DB) pension schemes with access to a range of alternative income sources in one portfolio.
The fund arrives at a time when pension schemes are increasingly seeking alternative income, as yields from traditional asset classes remain scarce.
A survey conducted in December 2015 of BlackRock’s largest institutional clients, representing USD6.6 trillion, found that private markets look set to prosper in 2016. More than half (53 per cent) intended to increase their allocation to real assets and 47 per cent intended to increase their allocation to
BarclayHedge has ranked Elberon Investment Fund as one of the world's top-performing "long bias" equity funds for the three-year period ending on 31 March 2016.
Elberon, which is managed by Bruce Salomon, ranked number eight globally and number two in the US among more than 230 long-biased funds.
All funds ranked had at least USD10 million in assets under management and an average net exposure greater than 35 per cent. Elberon is the only Texas-based fund that finished in the top ten.
“It’s a tremendous honour to be singled out as a fund that uniquely compounds capital over
Northern Energy Capital (NEC) and Roundtable Capital Partners have completed the initial closing of NEC Fund I Canadian at approximately USD45 million.
The fund will be wholly focused on investing in oilfield services and related industrial businesses in Canada.
With a pool of almost 5,000 investable oilfield services businesses in both the private and public arenas of the sector, the opportunities are substantial with valuations at 30-year lows.
The oilfield services sector is struggling through one of the most significant downturns in its history, and the financial and operating capabilities of many of the participants have been severely
FIX Trading Community has released Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) version 1.0 Draft Standard to support high performance demands in transactions and/or data feeds.
Recent improvements in the speed of hardware, software and network connections have prompted the High Performance Working Group to examine the current version of the FIX Protocol to address how the requirements for new financial applications such as high-frequency trading and market data can be met. The challenge was to produce a standard, non-proprietary binary message encoding which is intended to work independently or in conjunction with other high performance FIX standards.
Simple Binary Encoding is
