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By James Williams – The average hedge fund was up 6 per cent through April and whilst the de-coupling argument largely holds up well for the Asia region, recent events in Europe have nevertheless had some ripple effect. Whenever macro stories come to the fore, correlations increase across all major assets and hedge fund performance tends to drop off.
“That’s especially true in Asia,” comments Graham Seaton (pictued), Head of APAC Prime Brokerage at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, from the firm’s Hong Kong office. “Recent macro developments have meant that along with fundamental strategies such as long/short equity, some relative
Interview with Andrew Gordon – “It really took off in Asia last year,” comments Andrew Gordon, head of BNY Mellon’s Alternative and Broker Dealer Services, Asia Pacific, when discussing the firm’s prime custody model. Launched in 2009, it has grown into one of the fastest growing businesses within Alternative Investment Services (AIS) with approximately USD157billion in AuC.
BNY Mellon has moved quickly to service the entire liability side of hedge funds and with counterparty risk at the top of everyone’s agenda it’s little surprise that prime custody has become popular.
“The prime custody business was first conceived ahead of
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) will begin disseminating values for its first interest rate-based volatility index, the CBOE Interest Rate Volatility Index (ticker: SRVX), on Monday, 18 June.
The SRVX Index is designed to offer fixed income options traders and portfolio managers a standardized and transparent measure of interest rate swap volatility.
CBOE’s Interest Rate Volatility Index measures expected basis-point volatility in the interest rate swap market. Specifically, the index is based on one-year/ten-year US dollar-denominated swap options (swaptions), which are one of the most actively traded contracts in the USD14.5-trillion notional over-the-counter (OTC) US dollar interest rate option
By James Williams – Athos Capital is a new merger arbitrage hedge fund founded by portfolio manager Matt Moskey, trader Erik Senko and former COO of Black’s Link Capital, Fred Schulte-Hillen. Moskey and Senko previously ran an Asian product under Tiresias Capital Hong Kong Ltd; a subsidiary of event-driven firm Omni Partners. Prior to that, in 2007, the pair opened up the Asian office for London-based Centaurus Capital.
Thanks to the principals’ pedigree, Athos Capital had no trouble choosing their prime brokers. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source familiar with Athos confirms that both Goldmans and Morgan Stanley were
By James Williams – A recent industry survey that ranked Asian prime brokerages based on hedge fund AUM was both predictable and unexpected. Predictable in the sense that Goldman Sachs remains the leading broker in Asia. Unexpected in the sense that Morgan Stanley, ranked Number 2 in the survey, was only some USD420million ahead of Credit Suisse (with approximately USD19.2billion in AUM), with Deutsche Bank and UBS each gaining 10 per cent market share.
Since 2008, Goldmans and Morgan Stanley have seen their market share in the region halved as European players and the likes of Bank of America Merrill
Interview with Charles Kwun – “We started last year working on plans to expand the fund service in Asia,” comments Charles Kwun (pictured), managing director, Vistra Fund Services Asia.
Vistra Fund Services is an independent fund administrator. In May 2012, it launched the Privium Capital Fund structure in Hong Kong; a turnkey solution that works with a variety of service providers to give start-up managers a cost-effective route to market.
Last year Vistra launched a similar solution in Luxembourg using an onshore fund structure with London-based Privium Fund Management acting as investment adviser. This was the prototype that prompted Vistra
Darren Upton has joined alternative investment manager International Standard Asset Management (ISAM) as Head of Research.
Upton will report into Alex Greyserman, CIO of ISAM Systematic. He will be leading the development of new systems and markets, and responsible for the maintenance and ongoing improvements to ISAM’s existing systems as well as developing algorithms for execution to preserve low levels of trading costs. Most recently Darren worked for Man Group as Head of Research Methodology, where he led an extensive group of researchers in developing trading models, portfolio construction and execution methods which form the AHL trading system. Darren started
By Bronwyn King (pictured) and Alex Last – Despite (or perhaps because of) global market volatility, the appetite of fund managers for all things Chinese, from investing in offshore RMB to trading on the domestic capital markets, continues apace. Recently, however, there appears to have been a shift in opportunities for both Chinese investors and global fund managers. Over the past decades, the focus for both foreign investors and Chinese regulators has been entirely inbound in nature. However, with the proliferation of domestic Chinese investors, the rapid accumulation of large pools of RMB capital, along with inadequate global liquidity, a
Advent Capital Management has appointed Osbert Hood, former chairman and chief executive officer of MacKay Shields, as chief operating officer (COO).
Ed Johnson, Advent’s current COO, will be leaving Advent after transitioning his duties to Hood.
“Throughout his time at Advent, Ed was an important resource to us as we developed and leveraged our institutional quality infrastructure and operational processes to grow the business into one of the largest global firms focused on convertible securities with an emphasis on credit and high yield debt,” says Tracy Maitland, President and Chief Investment Officer of Advent. “We wish Ed and his
Hedge fund flows as measured by the GlobeOp Capital Movement Index advanced 1.60% in June.
"Solid net flows into hedge funds continued in June," says Hans Hufschmid, chief executive officer, GlobeOp Financial Services.
The GlobeOp Capital Movement Index represents the monthly net of hedge fund subscriptions and redemptions administered by GlobeOp. This monthly net is divided by the total assets under administration (AuA) for GlobeOp’s fund administration clients.
Cumulatively, the GlobeOp Capital Movement Index for June 2012 stands at 147.64 points, an increase of 1.60 points over May 2012. The Index has advanced 13.58 points over the past
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