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The Hedge Fund Association (HFA) has appointed Christina Bodden and Colin Nicholson as co-directors of the association’s Cayman Islands Chapter.
These hedge fund industry professionals have been selected to direct the HFA’s local member events and educational programmes, and to contribute to the organisation’s global mission of increasing transparency, accelerating business and professional development, and fostering greater trust in alternative investments.


Bodden is a partner in the investment funds group of international law firm Maples and Calder. She specialises in the structuring of private equity funds and advising on the related downstream transactions. Bodden also works extensively with major
European Commodity Clearing (ECC) is to offer reporting of transaction data – so-called trade reporting – in the framework of the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR).
According to Article 9 of EMIR, all market participants are obliged to forward transaction data regarding concluded derivatives transactions to a trade repository as of 12 February 2014.
These trade repositories are in charge of data collection and control as well as the forwarding of data to the national and European supervisory authorities. The EMIR reporting requirement applies to both trading transactions concluded on exchanges and to over-the-counter transactions.
In its capacity
Russian investors and brokers will be able to issue and cancel depositary receipts (DRs) in Russian companies thanks to an agreement between National Settlement Depositary (NSD) and BNY Mellon.
The two companies have developed a structure by which DRs, issued by BNY Mellon on shares of Russian companies, can be converted into a share or vice versa in Russia within one business day; this process currently takes between two and three business days.
The structure will allow DRs to trade on the secondary market, settle and be used as collateral in repurchase agreements (repos) by Russian market participants in their
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) and the London Metal Exchange (LME) have formed the board of LME Clear, the LME's self-clearing platform currently in development.
LME Clear is on track to launch, as planned, on 22 September 2014.
The board will be comprised of five independent non-executive directors and four executive board members.
The independent non-executive directors will be Richard Thornhill, chairman; John Harrison; Marye Humphery; Nat le Roux; and Marco Strimer.
The executive directors will be Trevor Spanner, chief executive of LME Clear; Gerald Greiner, HKEx head of global clearing; Garry Jones, chief executive of
There’s plenty of value to be found in European microcap shares for investors in 2014, according to veteran European small cap investors Philip Best (pictured) and Marc St John Webb at Geneva-based Argos Investment Managers.
Despite an outstanding 2013 for the duo’s Argonaut fund, which has risen by 39.2% since 1 January, they believe that many European stocks in their universe remain significantly undervalued.
“While 2013 has been a good year for Argonaut, our numerous ‘boots on the ground’ trips into the heartlands of industrial Europe still reveal plenty of deeply undervalued quality small businesses whose prices have yet to
The Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index finished up 1.31 per cent for the month of November, with all but two of the 10 sub-strategies recording positive gains.
Top of the pile was Equity Market Neutral with a return of 2.59 per cent followed by Managed Futures (2.09 per cent), Long/Short Equity (1.85 per cent) and Event Driven (1.68 per cent).
Dedicated Short Bias and Convertible Arbitrage were the two sub strategies to finish the month in negative territory with returns of -1.49 per cent and -0.20 per cent respectively.
The following funds were dropped from the Credit Suisse
Michael Stapleton of the Industrial Development Agency and Kieran Fox (pictured) of the Irish Funds Industry Association discuss the ongoing attraction of Ireland as Europe’s leading hedge fund centre and how their joint promotion work is helping attract ongoing FDI opportunities…
HW: Can you provide a quick introduction on the roles of the IDA and the IFIA?
MS: The IDA is a government agency at the front end of Ireland’s inward foreign direct investment program. We are interested in the substance of FDI; the investment itself and the jobs that are created, both directly and indirectly, from a given sector.
Athena Systems has released the latest 64-bit version of its “Aura” software.
Aura delivers fully customisable hedge fund management and analytics software.
The newest version of the Athena Aura gives users a series of important advantages in the capital markets.
Older 32-bit applications run up against a built-in memory limitation of 2 GB, which means data sets larger than 200 MB cannot be manipulated in real-time. A 64-bit application, like the new release of Aura, is not subject to the same memory limitation.
“There are specific types of funds that require this additional performance,” says Luis Otero,
Carne Group has named Michelle Wilson-Clarke as the latest addition to its team of Cayman Islands fund directors.
Carne’s Cayman Islands office now has seven independent fund directors.
Wilson-Clarke joins Carne from Intertrust Fund Services (Cayman) Limited.
Prior to that she was with Walkers Fund Services (WFS), a division of offshore law firm Walkers, which was acquired in 2012 by the Intertrust Group, where she was instrumental in the growth and development of the fiduciary services team. She began her financial services career with Wellington Management Company n Boston, Massachusetts.
At Wellington, Wilson-Clarke was vice president and relationship
Verrazzano Capital, the European equity specialist investment boutique founded by Guillaume Rambourg, has launched the Verrazzano Advantage European Fund.
The fund, a UCITS-compliant Luxembourg SICAV structure, aims to achieve long-term capital growth by investing at least 80 per cent of its assets in the shares of companies listed in Continental Europe.
The fund is Verrazzano’s first long-only product offered to external investors, following the 2012 launch of two European equity long-short strategies to qualifying investors.
Rambourg says: “We’re delighted to launch our first long-only fund and make it available to a broad investment audience. It is an important
