Managers
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
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
City Financial, an independent investment management firm with USD4 billion in group assets under management, has partnered with Novia Global to offer three risk‐rated model portfolios to international financial advisers.
The City Financial Cautious, Moderate and Adventurous model portfolios are managed by the firm’s multi‐asset team, led by veteran fund manager Mark Harris.
The portfolios are managed within pre‐determined risk limits that are independently verified by Distribution Technology, a risk profiling company.
The portfolios will be marketed by Global Wealth Management Solutions (GWMS), a financial product marketing firm focused on global intermediaries. GWMS also distributes the City Financial
The European Energy Exchange (EEX) is to acquire US-based Nodal Exchange for a low triple digit million US-Dollar investment.
As a result, Nodal Exchange will become part of EEX Group.
Nodal Exchange, headquartered in Virginia, is a regulated futures exchange which offers a variety of electricity and natural gas contracts to hedge against price risks in the US. All of the transactions on Nodal Exchange are cleared through its clearinghouse, Nodal Clear, a derivatives clearing organisation under the Commodity Exchange Act that is regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Through this acquisition, EEX Group will
ETF specialist Elston Consulting has licensed its Elston Strategic Beta Global Minimum Volatility index (ESBGMV) to Commerzbank for the creation of an investable certificate that tracks the index.
The certificate is issued with an initial notional of GBP10 million.
Whereas most minimum volatility indices relate to a single asset class such as global equities, Elston’s approach was to launch an index that targeted the minimum volatility portfolio created from a globally diversified range of asset classes represented by low cost iShares exchange traded funds (ETFs).
The objective of providing diversified, differentiated returns with downside risk mitigation makes this
Lyxor Asset Management has partnered with Wells Fargo Asset Management (WFAM) to launch the Lyxor/Wells Capital Financial Credit Fund, adding a credit specialist to its alternative UCITS platform.
The fund concentrates primarily on fixed income credit instruments of global financial sector companies, with a European focus.
The strategy invests across the capital structure of financial companies including senior, subordinated and contingent convertible bonds while hedging currency risk.
The investment philosophy is based on the conviction that fundamental credit research, combined with active asset allocation within a risk controlled framework, has the potential to generate sustainable returns over the
