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The performance of broad hedge fund indices signal a sharp rebound of Special Situation strategies in January (+6.3 per cent), followed by L/S Equity strategies (+5.5 per cent), according to the latest Weekly Brief from Lyxor’s Cross Asset Research team.
The reason why they outperformed is related to their higher market beta and their bias towards cyclical sectors/ risk factors. Concurrently, CTAs were down 1.6 per cent in January due to their short equity positioning.
Lyxor writes: “If we take a longer perspective, there is only one strategy in positive territory since end of September: Merger Arbitrage. Yet, Special
Kuwait-based bank Warba Bank (Warba) has appointed investment consultant MJ Hudson Allenbridge to advise on the building out of its investment strategy and portfolio, including manager selection and integrated legal and investment due diligence.
MJ Hudson Allenbridge will be working in close partnership with Warba to develop its longer-term strategy and leading Sharia-compliant infrastructure across multiple asset classes, globally, including alternative investments. MJ Hudson Allenbridge advises a variety of institutional investors on strategy and investments across asset classes, and has extensive experience working with clients on complex and alternative investments.
Thuwaini Al Thuwaini, acting Chief Investment Banking Officer at
Adaptive Financial Consulting, a capital markets consultancy specialising in the development and support of real-time trading platforms, has appointed Amanda Harrison as a Senior Sales Executive in London.
Harrison has spent the last six years working at Saxo Capital Markets UK Ltd initially as Head of Client and Partner support and more recently driving Wholesale business growth as Solution Sales. Prior to this, Amanda spent two years working in the institutional relationship management team at GFT Global Markets
Harrison
Regulatory change has put the investor relations teams of UK companies’ under increasing pressure as demands from investors soar, according to the latest research from Orient Capital, the investor relations specialist and part of Link Group.
The implementation of MiFID II in January last year increased the range of responsibilities IR teams must take on as support they receive from brokers has reduced, and investors engage with issuers directly. This is placing IR teams under strain. In a survey of IR professionals from the UK’s 350 largest companies, 44 per cent see the limited resource available to them as their
Washington State residents Sung Hong a/k/a Lawrence Hong or Laurence Hong, his wife, Hyun Joo Hong a/k/a/ Grace Hong, and their company Pishon Holding, are to pay more than USD1.25 million in restitution in connection with an enforcement action brought by the CFTC charging the defendants with fraudulent solicitation and misappropriation involving futures contracts.
In addition to the restitution, the Court Order also imposes a permanent trading and registration ban on the Hongs and Pishon and prohibits them from violating provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) as charged.
The Court’s Order stems from a CFTC Complaint filed on
Q&A with Karl O’Reilly, Fund director at International Management Services Ltd (IMS)
Change is always happening and as we near the end of the current investment cycle the world is learning to deal with increased and persistent market volatility. With this market backdrop, the role of independent directors remains as important as ever. Institutional investors are taking a more proactive approach in reviewing the directors of hedge funds, so it is essential that investment managers take the appointment of directors seriously.
Karl O’Reilly, Fund Director at IMS, outlines some of the key considerations that investment managers should be discussing when
Fund administrators have, over the last decade, focused a lot of attention and marketing dollars to persuade clients to buy customised, premium value-add services, in a bid to stand out from the crowd. To some extent, this has been a period of seduction, driven in large part by the incredible sophistication and evolution of technology tools.
This has empowered fund administrators to ramp up their middle-office offerings and get closer to their clients. That is no bad thing, but according to Robin Bedford (pictured), CEO of Opus Fund Services (‘Opus’), all that most fund managers want is an accurate, timely,
Robotic process automation is accelerating productivity within the financial sector. Much of the recent progress that’s been made innovating artificial intelligence (AI) technology toward greater efficiency has been driven by the significant resource investments of fund administrators, such as U.S. Bank Global Fund Services.
“Since early 2013, our teams have worked tirelessly to be able to fully strike an automated NAV with zero human intervention,” says Christine Waldron (pictured), chief global strategy officer at U.S. Bank Global Fund Services. “We’re now able to deliver this NAV five days sooner than we were able to historically.”
Robotic intervention has produced significant
Despite the undoubted uptake in cloud platforms by global hedge funds over the last few years, with much written on the scalability and cost benefits, the perception remains that cloud usage invites data security risks. This is not market ignorance.
A cloud security report by Crowd Research Partners1 found that 91 per cent of cybersecurity professionals share such concerns. In its “Navigating a cloudy sky” report, McAfee2 noted that approximately 25 per cent of public cloud users have suffered data loss.
Hedge funds have to balance private versus public cloud usage and remain confident at all times that their data is going
The amount of data is exponentially growing. A paper by IDC, Data Age 2025, said that 16.3 zettabytes of information was generated in 2017 (one zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes), and forecasted this amount would rise to as much as 163 zettabytes in 2025.
Making sense of all this data has become the next arms race, with artificial intelligence playing a pivotal role in pattern recognition and generating new insights for managers.
This is certainly true when one considers the new generation of hedge funds that are using autonomous learning and neural networks to run their portfolios. These funds ingest
