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“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labour does the body.” – Seneca.
Things are not getting any easier for asset managers, the gatekeepers of institutional assets with the power to make or break portfolios. In a new white paper entitled Searching for Alpha: Considering Alternatives to Generate Growth, Misys, one of the industry’s leading financial software companies, highlights three challenges faced by the investment management community, and four ways to potentially overcome them.
Those three challenges, says Misys, include: poor performance from traditional asset classes; more demanding investors who, following the harsh lessons of 2008, are less willing to
Opportunities continue to exist in Latin American debt despite negative news coming from the region, according to Market Vectors’ fixed income portfolio manager Fran Rodilosso.
“If you just read the headlines, you might surmise that Latin American countries are presenting the debt markets with multiple reasons to be concerned,” says Rodilosso. “But, bad news can also bring opportunity.”
Rodilosso points to a handful of what he termed “discouraging recent developments” that seem to be clouding market sentiment, including Venezuela’s re-election of Hugo Chavez and the Vitro bankruptcy proceedings that took place in Mexico earlier this year.
“Each of these events
A Greece focused hedge fund has been launched by Dromeus Capital Group, an emerging markets alternative investment specialist.
Dromeus is thought to be one of first funds to focus on opportunities in Greece.
The fund will focus on opportunities created by the dramatic sell-off in Greek assets since the start of the financial crisis. The Greek stock market has dropped by 83 per cent and the real GDP has contracted by 20 per cent since 2008.
Dromeus says that the size of the fund will be limited to EUR200m until there are substantial improvements in the liquidity of
The UN-backed Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) Initiative has issued a discussion paper on hedge funds to help its asset owner signatories better understand the risks associated with particular hedge fund strategies and instruments and the implications these may have for the performance of their portfolios and the broader market.
It also outlines some actions that investors can take to improve the governance of hedge funds.
The paper has been produced in response to growing interest from PRI signatories about how responsible investment relates to alternative investment strategies and instruments, including high frequency trading, leverage, shorting and the use
Sciens Alternative Investments has launched the Sciens Managed Account Risk Technologies (SMART), an interactive risk analytics and portfolio construction engine that enables investors to evaluate their hedge fund portfolios and aggregated fund exposures on Sciens Managed Account Platform (MAP).
John Godden, head of managed account platform, Sciens, says: “The main challenge for hedge fund investors is insufficient and/or out-of-date information on which to base investment decisions. We created SMART in response to a growing desire among institutional investors to manage Hedge Fund investments in the same way as their traditional equity/bond portfolios. SMART is unique because it draws upon up-to-date
Single manager alternative UCITS attracted EUR746million in net inflows in Q3 according to the latest quarterly compiled by MondoAlternative.
Interestingly, despite weekly liquidity funds only representing 21.7 per cent of the fund universe monitored by the firm, they attracted the most assets: EUR573million. This compares to just EUR24million for fortnightly funds. As to who was attracting the majority of Q3 inflows, the report shows that global asset managers – which they define as companies managing hedge funds and other investment vehicles – far outstripped smaller boutique hedge funds, attracting over EUR1billion in inflows.
Stefano Gaspari, CEO at MondoAlternative, was
As the West increasingly looks to the Mena region for new business, Fiona Le Poidevin (pictured), Chief Executive of Guernsey Finance – the promotional agency for the Island’s finance industry, looks at what the West has to offer in the form of the well-established fund domicile of Guernsey.
As the promotional agency for Guernsey’s finance industry, making a visit to Dubai in the final quarter of the year to exhibit at SuperReturn Middle East has become a familiar part of our marketing activity in recent years.
We are reminding private equity managers in the Middle East that Guernsey has established
Chinese equities are starting to catch up after underperforming the global market for two years, says Jian Shi Cortesi (pictured), fund manager of the JB Chindonesia Fund at Swiss & Global Asset Management…
From a macro perspective, recent economic figures from China have been a pleasant surprise, monetary policy has become more accommodating and moderate government stimulus in infrastructure is supporting a gradual improvement of China’s economy. On the micro side, industrial profit growth picked up in September and domestic prices of major commodities have bottomed out or started rising again. All these positive factors could lift the MSCI China Index,
Grant Thornton has appointed Michael Patanella as leader of its national asset management sector.
“Michael’s expertise and vast knowledge of asset management will be key as we continue to drive growth in this area of our financial services practice,” says Jack Katz, Grant Thornton’s Northeast region managing partner, New York Cluster managing partner and national financial services managing partner.
Patanella (pictured) has more than 15 years of public accounting experience, serving a wide range of financial services companies. His former and current clients include hedge funds, private equity firms, clearing and introducing brokers, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. He authors
Eighty per cent of the 300 financial officers from large European companies taking part in Greenwich Associates 2012 European Trade Finance Study — and nine out of 10 from companies in the FT 500 — expect pricing on trade finance products and services to increase as a result of the implementation of Basel III.
“In light of the funding and capitalisation issues facing European banks, large companies are not only concerned about pricing on trade finance services, they are also keeping an eye on banks’ shrinking risk appetite and the availability of trade finance in their important markets,” says Greenwich
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