John Redwood, chairman of Evercore Pan-Asset’s investment committee, looks at what the coming year could hold for the UK economy… There has been plenty to worry about in recent months in the UK. Many investors and commentators have told us how much damage a Eurozone collapse could do the fragile UK recovery. Even a prolonged period of Eurozone weakness as they struggle to keep the currency together damages export markets. The government’s Autumn Statement revealed as we predicted a major downwards revision to its deficit reduction plan, with slower growth in revenues and two extra years to get the deficit

TFS Capital has launched the TFS Hedged Futures Fund (TFSHX), which will compete for business with mutual funds that invest in managed futures.  Similar to the firm’s flagship mutual fund, TFS Market Neutral (TFSMX), TFS Hedged Futures will hold a basket of long and short positions. TFSHX will invest in futures contracts long that are believed to be undervalued and also hold a separate basket of futures contracts short that are believed to be overvalued.  The Portfolio Management team will employ quantitative models in an attempt to take advantage of short term inefficiencies in the markets.  Although the Fund will compete against other managed futures funds, TFS believes it will be unique from

By Simon Gray – The Cayman Islands are best known in the global financial industry as the world’s dominant offshore hedge fund domicile. Less familiar outside industry specialists is that the Caribbean jurisdiction is also home to a substantial fund services industry that continues to thrive, despite the combined pressures on costs and skilled manpower at home and competition from rival locations, especially in North America. In the 1990s, Cayman and other Caribbean locations such as Curaçao benefited from the so-called ‘10 Commandments’ that stipulated what activities relating to the management and operation of a fund had to be performed

By Simon Boor – Throughout the alternative fund industry, and especially in the Cayman Islands as the world’s largest hedge fund domicile, the focus today is more than ever on transparency, which means not just the availability of information but ease of access to it. That has been one of the drivers behind Admiral Administration’s development of Avatar, its state of the art proprietary transfer agency, CRM, workflow and reporting system, and Avatar FM, which allows seamless delivery of investor and portfolio information to the firm’s fund manager clients. Designed as the hub of Admiral’s information technology toolkit, Avatar provides

By Paul Harris –A new regulatory regime to address corporate governance and the way directors fulfil their fiduciary duties in the Cayman Islands is reported to be under consideration by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. This follows recent discussions in the press and at international conferences on the number of directorships held by individuals and investor demands for transparency, both issues that CIMA is expected to address in the near future.   However, these issues do not appear to have caused any recent problems involving Cayman hedge funds. Problem cases have in any event been few with regard to the

By Rohan Small – Recent developments are likely to be seen in retrospect as a turning point for fund governance in the Cayman Islands, because they dramatically demonstrate the risks involved where directors fail to carry out their duties properly and fail to provide true governance to a fund. The Cayman Islands Monetary AuthorityA), the industry regulator, had been considering the utility of a regime for fund directors for several years since the Beacon Hill and Bear Stearns cases highlighted failings in funds’ corporate governance.   Ernst & Young has been in the forefront of the debate on governance both