Funds
Deutsche Börse Cash Market: Deutsche Börse has introduced a new advanced version of its Xetra electronic trading system release 16.0, offering customers new matching functions specially designed for larger volume orders.
In addition hardware optimisation has furthermore led to an overall performance improvement and reduction in latency. 

“With the new Xetra Release we are supporting our customers from an early stage concerning the implementation of regulatory requirements resulting from the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, MiFID II. We are furthermore increasing the attractiveness of on-exchange trading compared to OTC trading through new features such as the Volume Discovery Order,”
A new trading team has joined London-based specialist CTO Old Park Capital to launch the SI8 strategy from 1 December.
According to the firm, the SI8 strategy is a systematic trading model that generates uncorrelated high risk adjusted returns from daily volatility of markets and trades equities, rates, FX and commodities, and has been run by Shin Ikoshi and Paul Condon since October 2014.
Ikoshi has over 20 years’ capital markets experience, specialising in trading exchanged listed futures and options working for Mizuho Bank, UBS AG, Daiwa SMBC Capital and the Singapore based credit fund, Opus Europe.
Old
Agecroft Partners has acquired the business of Alta Via Advisors, a New York based hedge fund third party marketing boutique.
Alta Via Advisors’ client base will be migrated over to Agecroft Partners and Andrew Feldman, Alta Via’s founding principal will join Agecroft Partners’ team in a senior management role where he will be responsible for all European operations as well as parts of North American client coverage. He will also be responsible for helping the firm with hedge fund due diligence, creating hedge fund industry research white papers and helping guide the overall vision of the firm.
Andy Feldman brings
LME Clear, the clearing house for the London Metal Exchange (LME) market, has launched two new services – trade compression and the ability to post metals warrants as collateral.
“We are delighted to be offering these two new services,” says Trevor Spanner (pictured), CEO of LME Clear. “As a new clearing house, LME Clear is in a great position to innovate and keep pace with change, and the launch of these services shows LME Clear understands the unique and particular workings of our market.”
LME Clear is the first clearing house ever to accept warrants as collateral. Market participants
On 28 August 2015 Aberdeen Asset Management PLC launched a USD500 million liquid alternatives fund – the Aberdeen Alternative Strategies Fund – designed to give investors access to a portfolio of alternative strategies. At the time, Morningstar quoted Andrew McCaffery, global head of alternatives at Aberdeen as saying: "Alternative investment strategies are becoming increasingly central to client portfolios and moving into the mainstream. This is why we have seen such strong demand for this fund. Many investors are constrained by complexity, liquidity, transparency and regulation."
This follows Aberdeen's acquisition of leading fund-of-hedge-funds manager Arden Asset Management and is just one
For a fund jurisdiction that refers to itself as an ‘Innovation Nation’, the Bahamas continues to build its profile and popularity among global fund managers, and, it is hoped that the next stage of its evolution will be to attract more institutional money.
To underscore how innovation is having a tangible impact, the Bahamas is on track to exceed its previous high-water mark for fund registrations. With more than 800 funds, the island is back to pre-2008 levels and firmly on the rebound.
“2015 has been a good year, the number of fund registrations is growing faster than fund liquidations,”
Hedge fund and private equity fund administrator Pinnacle Fund Services has selected PFS-PAXUS for the administration of the firm’s global fund operations business.
David Smith (pictured), Managing Director at Pinnacle, says: ’The selection of PFS-PAXUS has been mainly due to its reputation in the market for its sophistication and reliability. At Pinnacle we are excited about growing our fund administration business and with PFS-PAXUS’s track record as a robust and proven platform we are confident that the system will allow us to meet our business objectives’. 

Pinnacle Fund Services is a fund administration company. It is supported by a team
Lyxor Asset Management (Lyxor) and Och-Ziff Capital Management (Och-Ziff) have launched the Lyxor/OZ US Equity Opportunities Fund on Lyxor’s alternative UCITs platform.
The launch of this new US long/short equity strategy makes Lyxor the eighth alternative manager on the platform.
The Fund focuses on long and short investment opportunities in the US equity market, with the aim of producing positive, absolute returns with low volatility. The investment strategy employs an opportunistic approach that fuses deeply-researched, proprietary, long-term fundamental views with process-oriented expertise in corporate actions/events. The approach seeks to take advantage of mis-pricings in situations involving various types of
The number of Europe-focused private equity funds of funds to close so far in 2015 is at its lowest ever level, with just seven vehicles having held a final close. Despite slow fundraising, 2012 vintage funds have seen the highest median IRR historically and a substantial number of European investors are still showing an interest in committing to this strategy. In its latest factsheet, Preqin compiles the latest data on the European fund of funds market.
Read the full factsheet here.
This article, taken from the newly released Preqin Special Report: Natural Resources, looks at the make-up of institutional investors in natural resources, preferred strategies and regions, sources of allocations and future investment plans.
The increasing amount of capital raised by natural resources funds in recent years indicates healthy investor appetite for the asset class. As previously mentioned, a Preqin survey in June 2015 found that 29 per cent of investors in natural resources planned to increase their exposure to the asset class over the long term, compared with only 12 per cent that planned to reduce their allocations. Preqin’s
