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The geopolitical tensions surrounding the situation in Crimea, the Russian response and the consequent sanctions imposed by Western nations present an increasing source of risk within the global economy, says Andrew Cole (pictured), Investment Director of the Global Multi Asset Group at Baring Asset Management…
The latest developments have seen Russia move to incorporate Crimea, which formally applied to become part of the Russian Federation after the 16 March referendum showed strong voter support for breaking away from Ukraine.
Alongside the government of Ukraine, the US and EU dispute the constitutionality of the referendum. Diplomatic efforts to defuse the
Algomi, a provider of information-matching solutions to optimise fixed income liquidity, has named Grant Biggar as a strategic advisor, effective immediately.
Biggar (pictured), the former president of Creditex, has also made an investment in the company.
His appointment comes follows Howard Edelstein’s appointment to a similar role at Algomi.
As banks shift from risk to broker-like models in fixed income, the need to manage huge volumes of sensitive information has become paramount. Algomi enables banks to do this by creating real-time social collaborations internally and with end investors that identify the best trade opportunities.
With almost two
Managed futures gained 1.03 per cent in February, according to the Barclay CTA Index compiled by BarclayHedge.
The index is up 0.39 per cent in 2014.
“A late-month rally in commodity prices and the continued uptrend in US Treasuries contributed to a profitable month for most CTAs,” says Sol Waksman, founder and president of BarclayHedge.
Five of Barclay’s eight CTA indices had gains in February. The Barclay Diversified Traders Index was up 1.73 per cent, Systematic Traders gained 1.25 per cent, Financial & Metals Traders were up 0.58 per cent, and the Discretionary Traders Index rose 0.24 per
Global investors are moving toward a ”risk-off” stance, taking on greater protection as the prospect of geopolitical instability grows, according to the BofA Merrill Lynch (BoAML) Fund Manager Survey for March.
Responding at a point of growing tension in Ukraine, 81 per cent of investors said they see geopolitical risk posing a threat to financial markets stability – more than four times the reading one month ago.
Twenty-seven per cent of investors say that a geopolitical crisis is the biggest tail risk – up from 12 per cent in February.
At the same time, investors continue to express
Maples Fund Services has extended its regulatory reporting service to incorporate Annex IV reporting for AIFMD.
The new offering will provide an interactive solution for clients to streamline their regulatory reporting workflow from the capture of data and key assumptions through risk computations, review, approval, and straight-through reporting to the relevant authorities.
The new services will complement existing compliance and regulatory services including reporting for Form PF, CPO-PQR, and OPERA already provided to fund administration and middle office clients.
These services leverage proprietary solutions for accounting, performance and risk reporting performance reporting provided to middle and back office
One of the clearest differences between trading equities and fixed income securities is the extent to which analytics play a role in risk management.
Equities go up, they go down. Fixed income securities, however, are subject to numerous parameters such as credit risk, yield-to-maturity, default risk and duration risk to name but a few. Most investors understand equities, yet the vast majority would no doubt struggle to explain the mechanics of fixed income.
This is despite the fact that fixed income strategies – spanning government bonds, sovereign bonds, high-yield corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities, non-bank loans and emerging market bonds –
Global institutional trading network Liquidnet is planning to enter the fixed income market with its acquisition of bond trading platform Vega-Chi.
The partnership, subject to regulatory approval, will combine Liquidnet’s experience, scale and global reach within the institutional investment community with Vega-Chi’s corporate bond trading platform and sector expertise to accelerate efficiencies within the corporate bond market.
“There has been a massive increase in corporate bond issuance and at the same time a depletion of capital that dealers can use to facilitate trading. The result has been increasing difficulty among investment managers and dealers in accessing liquidity. To fix
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
