Funds
FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, has developed the FIXProtocol for use for transmitting MiFID II Transaction Reports to Approved Reporting Mechanisms (ARMs).
Under MiFID II, all investment firms (including certain buy-side institutions) executing transactions in financial instruments are required to report details of their transactions to the national regulator as quickly as possible, and no later than the close of the following working day. At the recently held FIX EMEA Trading Conference, nearly 70 per cent of respondents stated that use of the FIX Protocol would be their preferred standard
Crestline Investors, a credit focused institutional alternative asset manager, has held an additional closing of its Crestline Opportunity Fund III strategy, bringing capital in the strategy to USD720 million.
The strategy invests primarily in small to mid-size corporate and asset-based credit-oriented opportunities, with a focus in North America.
The new fund is the ninth in Crestline's series of opportunistic funds, which started in 2005 and have attracted nearly USD4 billion in client commitments to date.
The investment strategy seeks to take advantage of dislocations and inefficiencies in the primary and secondary credit markets in North America and Europe. The fund
Horseshoe Group has acquired IKONIC Fund Services (IKONIC) to form an independent fund administrator and insurance manager dedicated to both the Insurance Linked Securities and the alternative fund markets.
The transaction, which closed last week subject to customary regulatory approvals, will further solidify Horseshoe’s stance as the largest independent insurance manager to the Insurance Linked Securities (ILS) market and expand its service offering to now include fund administration. Post-acquisition, Horseshoe will have in excess of USD20 billion in assets under administration.
IKONIC, an independent, specialised fund administrator providing services to hedge funds, private equity funds, real estate funds and ILS
Hedge fund returns were divided in May with overall industry performance slightly negative at -0.09 per cent, bringing overall YTD returns to +0.75 per cent. Commodity hedge funds, the surprise performance leaders of the industry so far in 2016, produced negative aggregate returns in May, declining -0.46 per cent, halting a three-month run when the universe returned 6.99 percent, according to eVestment.
Despite being flat in aggregate, there is good news for investors in the multi-strategy fund universe. Much had been made of losses within some of the industry’s largest multi-strategy funds early in 2016, however the >USD1 billion AUM multi-strategy
Newfleet Asset Management, an affiliate of Virtus Investment Partners, has closed a USD356.3 million collateralised loan obligation (CLO).
Newfleet CLO 2016-1 will be backed by a diversified portfolio of broadly syndicated senior secured floating rate loans, with six classes of notes rated by Moody's and S&P and unrated subordinated notes. The CLO will have a two-year non-call and a four-year reinvestment period with a final maturity of 12 years. Newfleet's parent, Virtus, retained 100 per cent of the subordinated notes.
David L Albrycht, CFA, Newfleet's president and chief investment officer, said the successful offering marks the first transaction for Newfleet's
Since its inception on 6 May 2016, the RWC Asia Absolute Alpha Fund generated a return of 0.7 per cent for the month. The fund spent most of May with low net exposure while its manager, Garret Mallal assessed the macro outlook.
The fund was borne out of a conversion of the RWC Global Innovation Absolute Alpha Fund, as a new fund within the RWC UCITS umbrella and follows a similar strategy to the team’s existing Cayman-domiciled Asia long/short fund, also managed by Mallal. Mallal and his team employ a long/short pan-Asia approach using equities, as well as currencies and
NetOTC, the risk solutions firm that has been designing and building a full end-to-end market infrastructure for non-cleared OTC derivatives in close collaboration with regulatory and industry bodies, banks and their end customers, has put its initiative on hold.
Roger Liddell (pictured), CEO, NetOTC, says: "We developed the NetOTC pooled initial margin structure to make the use of collateral both more effective and more efficient. Core to our ambition was the objective to increase market safety and to protect against collateral exhaustion. To achieve this, we have worked with industry participants to create an end-to-end technology platform, a legal structure
The latest report from Preqin finds that increasing numbers of active investors and a positive general view of performance among existing investors have driven inflows into CTAs over recent quarters.
The number of institutional investors actively investing in CTAs reached a record 1,067 in 2015, up from 1,017 in 2014. Furthermore, 69 per cent of investors interviewed at the end of 2015 reported that their CTA portfolios had met their performance expectations for the year, the second highest proportion of any leading hedge fund strategy. In the same survey, 29 per cent of all hedge fund investors said they planned
Hamburg-based investment house Alpha Centauri, which specialises in risk premia and equity multi-factor investing strategies, is to use S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Point-in-Time fundamental data and consensus estimates to support their quantitative research, modelling efforts and portfolio risk management.
S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Point-in-Time datasets aim to provide a more accurate representation of historical as-of-date market information, eliminating look-ahead bias, and enabling investors to look through data changes due to restatements. The Point-in-Time data will be delivered through S&P Global Market Intelligence’s flagship enterprise data management platform, Xpressfeed.
Alpha Centauri will use this data across the broad spectrum of
In a move to help protect clients ahead of the EU referendum on 23 June, PhillipCapital UK will be increasing its margin requirements. This will take place in two stages, with the first increase occurring on the 12th June and the second on the 19 June.
The increases will encompass all instruments.
GBP currency pairs and GBP denominated instrument will see margins raised to 10 per cent, with margins on remaining instruments raised to 5 per cent.
Sean Tan (pictured), Head of Derivatives Trading, says: “If the events of last January taught us anything, it was that markets can be
