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KNEIP has been appointed by Vontobel Asset Management to carry out fund data management, regulatory filing, KIID production and dissemination and financial reporting.
Vontobel Asset Management will be making use of KNEIP’s service across its entire Swiss- and Luxembourg-domiciled fund ranges.
Joel Kieffer, sales manager at KNEIP, says: “Our data, document and reporting management solution helps Vontobel streamline the data aggregation process and supports the generation and submission of the finalised documents to relevant authorities, in the relevant languages and formats.”
For regulatory filing, KNEIP’s solution was developed in partnership with CETRELSecurities and is fully sanctioned by Luxembourg
Oslo Børs has upgraded Oslo Connect, its OTC derivatives MTF trading and price discovery system, to the latest version of Edge, which is provided by Baymarkets.
Edge is the trading and registration platform used by exchanges, brokerage firms and banks in multiple markets throughout the world.
Oslo Connect combines the flexibility of the OTC market with the reliability of the standardised exchange market to ensure efficiency in trade processing for tailor-made derivatives. Users of Oslo Connect can negotiate and trade derivatives, utilising straight through processing (STP) into Oslo Clearing or bilateral deal capture and settlement.
The upgraded Oslo
Euronext has signed agreements with four exchanges in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the implementation of its new UTP solution, UTP-Hybrid.
The four exchanges are the Amman Stock Exchange, the Beirut Stock Exchange, Bourse des valeurs Mobilieres de Tunis and the Muscat Securities Market.
The project will include the replacement of the NSC trading platform, support for which will be discontinued from a commercial perspective in 2015.
The MENA region has a sophisticated financial markets industry with exchanges looking for a cost-effective, high performance platform to support growth in equities or entry into new
Solactive AG has launched the Solactive European Buyback Index (BUYEU), which will be used to underlie index-linked products by Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB).
This includes swaps, options, warrants and certificates.
Buyback is defined as the purchase of its outstanding shares by a company. It is well-known as an alternative way for companies to ‘return’ cash to their shareholders by increasing earnings per share, used first in the US and more and more in Europe as well.
By repurchasing some shares, companies officials, regarded as having superior information, state that they consider the current shares
USD4.1trn of European financial and non-financial corporate debt rated by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services is expected to mature between 2014 and 2018.
Of this USD4.1trn, USD866m is scheduled to mature in 2014 and, given normal data reporting lags, the credit market may have already accommodated a portion of this amount.
After 2014, the annual scheduled maturities are USD909bn in 2015, USD863bn in 2016, USD754bn in 2017, and USD678bn in 2018.
Financial companies account for 60 per cent (USD2.4trn) of Europe's maturing debt, and 86 per cent (USD3.5trn) of the debt is rated investment grade ('BBB-' and higher),
Confluence, a provider of automated data management solutions for the investment management industry, has appointed Hugh Byrne as managing director of sales.
Based in London, Byrne will be responsible for setting Confluence's strategic sales direction in Europe and continuing to drive growth throughout the region.
“Hugh brings a wealth of valuable experience positioning high-value complex solutions to deliver business value to the asset management industry," says Todd Moyer, senior vice president of global sales, who leads Confluence’s international expansion efforts. "His extensive knowledge of investment management operations will be invaluable to our clients as they look to solve increasingly
Hedge funds gained two per cent in February, according to the Barclay Hedge Fund Index compiled by BarclayHedge.
The index is up 1.59 per cent year to date.
“Improving investor sentiment fuelled by robust M&A activity and strong corporate earnings helped most global equity markets rebound in February, with the exception of China, Japan, and Russia,” says Sol Waksman, founder and president of BarclayHedge.
For the second straight month, the Barclay Healthcare & Biotechnology Index led the way with a 5.01 per cent gain, and is up 11.19 per cent after two months of trading in 2014.
By Daniel Mayo, Principal Consultant (KPMG in the US) and Rowan Liu, Associate (KPMG in the US) in the Financial Services Tax practice in New York City – On 5 November, 2013, the US Treasury Department (Treasury) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued final regulations1 that address when a transfer or assignment of a derivative contract does not result in a taxable event to the non-assigning counterparty for purposes of section 1001 and Treasury regulations section 1.1001-1(a).
Industry research firm IBISWorld has added a report on the hedge funds industry to its industry report collection.
While the industry has received a considerable amount of criticism regarding its performance in comparison to US equities, an increasing amount of industry professionals have called into question the relevance of benchmarking hedge fund returns exclusively against equity performance.
As a portion of hedge fund fees are traditionally based on the total value of assets under management (AUM), consistent growth in industry AUM has benefited the hedge funds industry immensely over the five-year period.
According to the latest available data
The Hennessee Hedge Fund Index was up 2.46 per cent in February, trailing both the S&P500, which rose 4.31 per cent, and the Nasdaq Composite Index, which increased 4.98 per cent during the month.
Healthcare and biotech was the top performing strategy for the month the index with a return of 4.14 per cent followed by distressed (3.72 per cent) and international (3.29 per cent).
The worst performers meanwhile were short-biased (-2.34 per cent), market neutral (-0.02 per cent) and convertible arbitrage (0.19 per cent).
“Risk assets reversed course again in February as volatility, measured by the VIX,
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