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The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index, which provides a representative baseline for how the broad liquid alternative investment category performs, returned 0.32 per cent in September, underperforming the 0.60 per cent return of the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index.
The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index family is a joint offering between Wilshire Funds Management, the global investment management business unit of Wilshire Associates Incorporated, and Wilshire Analytics, creator of the Wilshire 5000 Total Market IndexSM.
“While most strategies performed well this month, CTAs were the one strategy that performed poorly, given the significant move in US rates as well as the
Thomson Reuters has added additional research management and search capabilities to its flagship desktop product, Eikon aimed at meeting the challenges of MiFID II requirements, set to be implemented on 3 January, 2018.
Launched and incorporated into Eikon this year, the Search and Discovery (S&D) solution allows its users to quickly drill into multiple and disparate sources of unstructured text – news, filings, transcripts, research, etc – with a single search. Search capabilities can also be extended, using Thomson Reuters proprietary data management capability, to documents uploaded by the user, or firm, allowing Eikon to act as the central repository
Wedbush Securities has appointed Dan Billings as its Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
Billings (pictured), joined Wedbush in 2015 as the firm’s Senior Vice President and Controller. In his new role he will oversee Financial and Regulatory Accounting, Finance, and Internal Audit and Controls.
Founder and President, Edward Wedbush, says: “Dan’s extensive knowledge and experience in financial services and with regulatory matters, will have a positive impact on the firm. We welcome him as the newest member of the executive management team.”
Prior to joining Wedbush, Billings served as Vice President, Treasury, and Senior Vice President,
All six of IndexIQ’s IQ Hedge Indexes recorded positive performance in September.
Returns were led by the IQ Hedge Long/Short Index, up 1.18 per cent for the month, followed by the IQ Merger Arbitrage Index, which returned 1.10 per cent in the period. The IQ Hedge Long/Short Index is also the top performing index in this family on a year to date (YTD) basis, up 11.02 per cent for the year through September.
“Global markets turned in strong performance in September with domestic indices lagging behind international,” says Salvatore Bruno (pictured), IndexIQ’s Chief Investment Officer. “Earlier in the month,
Preqin’s latest overview of women in alternative assets finds that just under one in five employees at fund management firms is female. This rate varies widely by role, and consistently declines according to seniority.
The highest proportion of women is seen among junior employees, where they constitute 29 per cent of the workforce. However, in each asset class the representation of women falls according to seniority, and overall senior alternative assets staff consist of 11 per cent women. In the same way, women are best represented in investor relations/marketing teams, as high as 53 per cent at venture capital firms.
Colt Technology Services has implemented further network optimisations to two of the company’s key low-latency routes in the APAC region.
Connectivity is available for service now and provided through the company’s private Ethernet-based Colt IQ Network. Latency for the Hong Kong-to-Singapore route has been reduced to approximately 29ms (RTD) going from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) to the Singapore Exchange (SGX). Latency for the Sydney-to-Tokyo route has been reduced to approximately 99ms (RTD) going from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to the Japan Exchange Group (JPX/CC2). For both routes, the latency numbers above currently represent the top tier among
TransFICC, a provider of low-latency connectivity for fixed income and derivative markets, has secured EUR1 million in early stage investment from capital markets specialists, Illuminate Financial and Frankfurt based early stage investor in FinTech, Main Incubator.
TransFICC provides banks and asset managers with an alternative to maintaining connectivity to multiple e-Trading venues, offering a unified low-latency, robust and scalable API. TransFICC enables financial institutions to access their required eTrading venues, while streamlining technology requirements and reducing operational costs. Its co-location or cloud-based hosting technology also supports microsecond timestamping of data, helping to provide an audit trail for best execution requirements.
DC Thomson is partnering with Electronic Research Interchange (ERIC) to develop its bespoke investment research offering for the post-MiFID II world. This transaction will see DC Thomson acquire a material stake in ERIC.
The partnership will enable ERIC to create tailored research solutions for both investment managers and research providers, using DC Thomson’s digital publishing experience to source and deliver quality research content that caters to their specific needs. ERIC has chosen a non-financial services industry partner to retain the independence of its proposition and to benefit from DC Thomson’s indexing technology and expertise. As a new industry of investment
Cordium, a provider of governance, risk and compliance services, has expanded its Cybersecurity and Data Protection Consulting Services to the UK to help investment firms prepare for and manage the requirements of the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect in May 2018.
GDPR will introduce a rigorous set of data privacy and security requirements – spanning 99 articles and 173 recitals – for any organisation that services European clients, regardless of where the company is located. The costs of non-compliance will be severe, with fines of up to EUR20 million or 4 per cent of annual
By Nick Bayley (pictured), Duff & Phelps – With less than three months until the introduction of MiFID II, in some parts of the industry there is a palpable sense of panic as the deadline looms. Following the 20 September speech by FCA Enforcement chief Mark Steward, firms can take some comfort that the FCA will not immediately enforce MiFIDII in its entirety, provided firms can demonstrate that they have taken “sufficient steps to meet the new obligations”.
Although firms might not have all their ducks in a row, there are likely to be a couple of areas they should prioritise.
