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Alternative UCITS funds continued to pare back gains made in the first two months of the year.
The Litman Gregory Masters Alternative Strategies Fund (MASFX) has passed USD250 million in net assets – just six months after the fund launched on 30 September, 2011.
"Demand for the fund continues to exceed our expectations," says Ken Gregory, Chief Investment Strategist and Founding Partner of Litman Gregory. "We, like a lot of other investors, believe that the investment environment will remain at an elevated risk level for a number of years. Alternative strategies that seek to offer relatively low correlation to stocks and bonds, relatively low risk, and the potential for above average risk-adjusted returns may be appealing. This
The NASDAQ OMX Group has been selected as technology partner for the New Zealand market (NZX). NASDAQ OMX will deliver its widely deployed X-stream technology to power NZX’s trading platform.
The new platform will handle trading of equities and derivatives securities and is scheduled to be rolled out at the end Q3 or early Q4 of 2012. NASDAQ OMX was selected in competition with a number of global exchange technology providers.
X-stream is a multi-asset trading system that complies with international standards and is capable of handling equities, derivatives, commodities, ETFs and a range of other instruments on one single
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed a federal court action in Utah charging Bentley Equities, LLC (Bentley), a Delaware corporation, and its principals, Christopher D Hales and Eric A Richardson, with fraud and misappropriation in connection with commodity futures trading.
Richardson resides in Cedar Hills, Utah, and Hales is currently an inmate at the Florence, Colorado, Federal Correction Complex. None of the defendants has ever been registered with the CFTC.
The CFTC’s complaint, filed May 2, 2012, in the US District Court for the District of Utah, alleges that from at least April 2009 through August 2010,
The newly launched EMERGENCE seeding platform, created in early 2012 with the backing of seven major French institutional investors and managed by internationally recognised seeder NewAlpha Asset Management, has announced its first seeding partnership with Eiffel Investment Group, through its compartment Emergence Performance Absolute.
After a rigorous selection process, driven by NewAlpha and closely associating investors, EMERGENCE will invest approximately USD40 million in the Eiffel Credit Opportunities Fund, a discretionary long short European credit fund managed by Eiffel Investment Group. This will bring the fund’s assets close to USD100 million, a critical size requested by many institutional investors before considering
The Dow Jones Credit Suisse Core Hedge Fund Index closed down 0.33% in April as most of the index component strategies reported negative results for April.
Event driven and long/short equity were the worst performing sub strategies, down 0.64% and 0.63% respectively, while fixed income arbitrage was the only strategy to end the month in positive territory with a gain of 0.29%.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has affirmed the District Court’s grant of summary judgment against Michael Lauer, who controlled several hedge funds.
The Eleventh Circuit held that the District Court “had before it overwhelming evidence of Lauer’s knowing false statements.” The Eleventh Circuit also found that the District Court did not abuse its discretion in ordering Lauer to disgorge more than USD62 million. In addition, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s decisions denying Lauer’s repeated efforts to modify the asset freeze and change venue.
On 23 September, 2008, the Honourable Kenneth A Marra, United
The hedge fund industry is starting to witness a growing trend in outsourcing front-office trading desk operations. Start-up hedge funds in particular benefit from outsourcing if they lack sufficient capital to build out their own in-house trading desk, and this appears to be especially true of Asia where the size of hedge fund start-ups, generally speaking, remains small.
To capitalise on the trend, BTIG Hong Kong Limited, an affiliate of BTIG LLC, has been busy getting its outsourced trading desk message out to emerging managers, with the firm’s Executive Director, Trevor Harrison (pictured), confirming to Hedgeweek that “probably half of
Redkite Financial Markets, a specialist provider of market surveillance systems, has generated the world’s first ever ESMA alert.
The alert was generated at 9:05am on 2 May, the first day of European trading, following the 1 May deadline for firms to comply with ESMA’s guidelines on systems and controls in an automated trading environment. The alert related to potential ‘quote stuffing’, a form of manipulative trading activity, that involves entering large numbers of orders and/or cancellations/updates to orders to camouflage a particular strategy, or to create uncertainty for other participants, slowing down their process.
Robert Kay, CEO, Redkite Financial Markets,
In April 2012, the international derivatives exchanges of Eurex Group recorded an average daily volume of 10.9 million contracts (April 2011: 10.5 million).
Of those, 8.3 million were Eurex Exchange contracts (April 2011: 7.6 million), and 2.6 million contracts (April 2011: 2.9 million) were traded at the US-based International Securities Exchange (ISE). In total, 156.9 million contracts were traded at Eurex Exchange and 52.0 million at ISE. This makes April the best month in terms of trading volumes in 2012.
Eurex Exchange traded 64.6 million equity index derivatives contracts (April 2011: 49.9 million). The single largest contract was the future
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