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The Euronext Milling Wheat futures contract listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is showing encouraging levels of market interest, following its official start of trade on 8 July. To date, the JSE has traded just over 10 000 tons of wheat.
Trading value recorded is close to SA Rand 24 million. Open interest is at 204 contracts, indicating a healthy start for the contract. Open interest records the number of contracts for particular futures that are outstanding.
As part of a mutual license agreement finalised in February 2015, the JSE indicated it would offer market participants a cash-settled
In this extract from the Preqin Quarterly Update: Hedge Funds, Q2 2015, we take a look at recent industry performance using the latest data available.
Q2 2015 was a volatile quarter for hedge funds but still broadly positive with hedge funds (+1.45 per cent) outperforming the S&P 500 (-0.03 per cent) for the second consecutive quarter. CTAs, however, had a difficult quarter, returning -3.92 per cent for Q2 2015 as many trends reversed during the quarter along with the ongoing negotiations regarding Greek debt and extraordinary volatility in the Chinese public markets, leading to many CTAs giving back much of their strong performance generated through Q1 2015.
Equity
Preqin’s Real Estate Online provides comprehensive information on 76 institutional investors based in Chicago that actively invest in real estate, which collectively represent over USD57 billion invested in the asset class. Nearly a quarter of all institutional real estate investors based in Chicago are foundations (Fig 1), closely followed by private sector pension funds (20 per cent), and endowment plans, public pension funds and wealth managers, which each comprise 13 per cent of the total number.
Due to the large proportions of smaller investors in terms of assets under management (AUM), such as foundations, endowments and wealth managers, 47 per
CBOE Holdings has promoted Andy Lowenthal (pictured) from Vice President to Senior Vice President, Business Development. Lowenthal’s promotion comes as part of a reorganisation designed to better leverage the company’s business development efforts across its expanding line of futures and options products and services.
Lowenthal’s responsibilities have been expanded to include the business development functions of the CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE), home of futures on the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX Index) and an array of related products. He also will oversee business development for Livevol, a leading provider of equity and index options technology and market data services. CBOE’s acquisition
smartTrade Technologies, a provider of multi asset trading solutions for banks, brokers and asset managers, is to build and host the e-trading platform for R5FX, a new liquidity pool specialising in the trading of emerging market currencies.
Electronic trading in emerging markets FX (EMFX) saw an increase of 300% in the 12 months to November last year. This has fuelled the need for increased efficiency, market transparency and liquidity.
“R5FX offers both bank and non-bank venues, providing equal access to Emerging Market currencies, enabling fast and efficient trading,” says Jon Vollemaere, CEO of R5FX. “We chose smartTrade’s platform as
TradingScreen, an independent provider of electronic trading solutions, and a group of 15 European long-only asset managers have launched TradeCross, the first buy side-designed crossing platform for fixed income corporate bonds.
With the support and collaboration of these asset managers, TradeCross enables participants to uncover and unlock hidden liquidity from buy-side inventories along with other new sources of liquidity to complement the traditional trading approach for credit products.
TradeCross covers all segments of the credit market – investment grade, emerging markets, high yield – and offers buy-side traders the ability to anonymously trade blocks while respecting their sell-side relationships
Irish Funds is predicting the government’s announcement permitting Irish domiciled funds to invest in the Chinese securities market via the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Scheme, will prompt dozens of applications from investment managers.
Pat Lardner, CEO at Irish Funds, says: “This is exciting news in the near term for the dozens of managers who can now move with certainty to provide access to this important investment channel. As importantly, it will allow the hundreds of global investment managers who already have Ireland as a strategic base for their cross-border funds to utilize this important access point. The detailed and considered
Hedge funds lost 0.91 per cent in June, according to the Barclay Hedge Fund Index compiled by BarclayHedge. The Index remains up 3.52 per cent year to date, outperforming the S&P 500 Index which has gained 1.23 per cent.
“Grexit fears and China’s stock market in free fall took a toll on risk assets in June,” says Sol Waksman (pictured), founder and president of BarclayHedge.
Fourteen of Barclay’s 18 hedge fund indices had losses in June. The Global Macro Index dropped 2.24 per cent, Emerging Markets were down 1.81 per cent, Distressed Securities lost 1.36 per cent, European Equities were
Thirty two per cent of market participants are currently booking Synthetic Financing transactions such as Total Return Swaps and Portfolio Swaps, according to a survey by swaps technology provider 4sight and consultancy The Field Effect.
A further 18 per cent plan to in the near future. Firms surveyed included a range of tier one and tier two investment banks and asset managers.
The survey was carried out as part of research for a whitepaper and webinar discussing market trends leading to an increase in Synthetic Financing, technology challenges and how to define a target operating model in light of increasing
Cowen Group is to acquire Concept Capital, an independent provider of prime brokerage services. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Cowen Group expects the acquisition to be accretive to earnings in 2015.
The transaction has been approved by the board of directors of both companies.
“Concept Capital’s strong presence among emerging hedge fund clients complements Cowen’s focus on providing best-in-class products and services to institutional clients,” says Peter A Cohen, Chairman and CEO of Cowen Group. “Given the changing prime broker landscape, many investment managers are looking for alternative prime solutions and there are a limited number of
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