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Over the last 24 months, fund administrator Drake Fund Advisors, an emerging market specialist with approximately USD900million in AuA, has established a number of licenses across the globe and fanned out from its BVI headquarters. The modus operandi behind this has been to scale up its business by focusing uniquely on the investor and develop a ‘follow a sun’ model that has, according to Executive Director Nicolaas Faure (pictured), helped Drake crack the operational blueprint.
“We’ve now got a number of offices in Asia, Europe and one in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as the BVI. If you keep
By Simon Schilder, Partner, Ogier – Whilst the twin challenges of investor capital continuing to favour established investment managers and increasing barriers to entry for new start-up investment managers, meant that at times 2013 was a fairly challenging year for BVI fund practitioners, for the new funds which did launch during the year, a number of interesting markets trends have continued to emerge and develop.
Themes for new fund raisings
Investment management fees
The majority of new fund raisings we saw in 2013 continued to follow the traditional fee model of a 2% management fee and 20% performance fee,
On 2 January 2014, an extension to the BVI’s Approved Manager regime was brought into legal force. When this lighter touch regulation was introduced at the end of 2012 demand was strong. The product proved, perhaps, to be more popular than the Islands’ financial regulator, the BVI FSC, had originally expected.
In its initial incarnation, any manager running an open-ended BVI fund with no more than USD400million in AuM or a closed-ended fund with USD1billion of aggregate capital commitments could apply for the Approved Manager license. The reason for introducing it in the first place was to allow smaller managers
ERI Scientific Beta has announced that all 2,958 smart beta indices available on its platform are now available with full transparency.
This transparency enables all the Scientific Beta indices to be fully compliant with ESMA’s recommendations on the transparency of financial indices, and in addition allows any counterpart in the index market to be able to check and analyse the track records published by ERI Scientific Beta.
“EDHEC-Risk Institute has been calling for many years for free access for investors to data relating to reference indices. We believe that making information available, not only on returns but also on
The Credit Suisse Liquid Alternative Beta (LAB) Index was down 0.94 per cent in January.
The event driven strategy was the strongest performer for the month, finishing up 0.18 per cent in January.
It was also the strongest performing strategy in 2013, returning 10.88 per cent.
Private financial cloud provider Options is to offer Quincy Data’s Quincy Extreme Data (QED) service, enabling it to offer data at the lowest known latencies to customers trading across markets in Equinix NY4 and the CME.


Quincy Data is a provider of extremely low latency market data services, powered by the McKay Brothers microwave network.
The QED service sources data from multiple financial exchanges and delivers a normalised feed to colocation centres around the world. To minimise latency, the service provides only key data items for the most liquid instruments.
Options customers can now access market data at
The SEC has charged two Wall Street traders involved in a fraudulent “parking” scheme whereby one temporarily placed securities in the other’s trading book to avoid penalties that would affect his year-end bonus.
The SEC’s enforcement division alleges that Thomas Gonnella solicited the assistance of Ryan King to evade a policy at his firm that penalises traders financially if they hold securities for too long.
Gonnella arranged for King, who worked at a different firm, to purchase several securities with the understanding that Gonnella would repurchase them at a profit for King’s firm.
By parking the securities in
Changes in market structure are prompting institutional investors to consider the potential expensive and disruptive step of changing the technology that services their trading desks.
A new report from Greenwich Associates, Fixed-Income Desks Lead Increase in Tech Spend, Likelihood to Change OMS/EMS Providers, reveals that 30 per cent of the head traders interviewed at 486 buy-side institutions say their firms are considering a change in the providers of their order management systems (OMS) or execution management systems (EMS).
Across institution types, the trend is stronger among investment managers (35 per cent) than hedge funds (29 per cent).
Among
Trader Instinct, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s global equities trading and consulting platform, is now available to sell-side brokers via Broker-Dealer Instinct, a trading, clearing and order flow management platform.
Broker-Dealer Instinct is a multi-asset platform that provides sell-side firms and their clients access to many of the same electronic trading tools that BofA Merrill’s internal trading desks use, as well as the infrastructure that the firm has built.
“Broker-Dealer Instinct is an easy and more efficient way to meet the needs of the sell-side,” says Jonathan Werts, head of broker-dealer execution. “It connects them to our industry-leading expertise,
The Carlyle Group has completed its acquisition of Diversified Global Asset Management (DGAM), a global manager of hedge funds with more than USD6.7bn in managed and advised assets.
Equity for the transaction came from Carlyle’s balance sheet. The transaction was first announced on 26 November 2013.
DGAM will join Carlyle’s Solutions platform alongside AlpInvest Partners, a global private equity fund of funds business with USD48bn of assets under management, and Metropolitan Real Estate Equity Management, a global real estate multi-manager with USD2.6bn in capital commitments. Including DGAM, the Solutions segment had assets under management of USD57.3bn as of 30
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