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Pan-Asian equities are at an inflection point this summer. The question everyone is asking is: have the Chinese authorities over-tightened, thus causing a hard landing in the economy, or have they finessed their tightening expertly and managed to create the much sought after ‘soft landing’. Rupert Foster (pictured), manager of the Matrix Asia UCITS Fund comments on why he is in the ‘soft landing’ camp…
I disagree with the bears who would point to the bursting of the property market bubble, stubbornly high levels of inflation creating fears of stagflation, and the likelihood of savage bad debt escalation after the
With relatively high equity market valuations and low interest rate environments in virtually all developed markets, South African investors looking for offshore diversification are faced with a challenging prospect in terms of both risk and returns.
According to Kevin Ewer, portfolio manager at Blue Ink Global, Blue Ink Investments’ offshore division, one solution for these investors would be to allocate a portion of their offshore portfolio to global hedge funds, which he believes currently offer far higher prospects of outperforming other asset classes on a risk/return basis, especially over the mid to long term.
“The case for hedge funds
Investors continued to allocate new capital to hedge funds through and despite the volatile performance environment in 2Q11, as new allocations to the hedge fund industry totalled nearly USD30 billion in 2Q11, according to data released today by HFR in the latest edition of Global Hedge Fund Industry Report: 2Q11.
Inclusive of the USD32 billion in inflows from the previous quarter, inflows in H1 2011 exceeded USD62 billion, the strongest half-year total since 2H07, when the industry saw USD75 billion in inflows. Strong 2Q inflows offset a modest performance-based asset decline, and extended the record level of capital invested
Tradar, a provider of portfolio management and accounting software to the buy-side globally, has seen a 20 per cent uplift in its US client numbers since the start of 2011. With the investment management community facing a challenging and ever-changing environment, Tradar’s recent success reflects its ongoing commitment to delivering a robust and transparent solution with low total cost of ownership (TCO) available via on-site, or cloud based deployment options.
Tradar has witnessed soaring demand for its flagship product Insight, with new clients in the US adding to a rapidly growing community of users in Europe and Asia. Tradar’s
National Futures Association (NFA) has hired Jamila Piracci as Vice President of OTC Derivatives, a new position created to oversee the regulation of swap dealers (SDs) and major swap participants (MSPs). Piracci comes to NFA from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
"We are very excited to have Jamilla join NFA," says NFA President Dan Roth (pictured). "With her extensive background in swaps and depth of experience she is the perfect candidate to lead NFA’s efforts in this area."
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) proposed rules delegate NFA the responsibility of processing applications for registrations as SDs and
Managed futures lost 1.31% in June according to the Barclay CTA Index compiled by BarclayHedge. Year-to-date, the Barclay CTA Index is down 1.51%. Seven of Barclay’s eight CTA indices had losses in June.
The Barclay Diversified Traders Index dropped 2.24%, Systematic Traders were down 1.97%, Agricultural Traders lost 0.11%, and Currency Traders were down 0.35%.
“The only thing that went up in June was volatility,” says Sol Waksman (pictured), founder and president of BarclayHedge. “Three major trends are creating a deep underlying uncertainty that is driving this volatility.
“The first issue is loose money in developed markets in an attempt
Although they outperformed the broader market, July was a second tough month at the office for Australian hedge fund managers. Based on 70% of the funds that have reported to date, the average fund lost -1.41% compared with the ASX 200 which fell -2.13%. This follows from May’s negative results when the average fund lost -0.68% compared with the ASX 200 which fell -2.38%.
At one stage the ASX200 was down around 6%, before a rally and some year end window dressing left the market looking much more respectable than it really was. Downward pressure from the Euro zone debt
After some disappointing returns in May, the stock market endured another difficult month. In June, the S&P 500 index recorded a second month of significant losses (-1.67%) and implied volatility (16.5%) rose again (1%). However, these hard times brought an end to the unsustainable growth of the stock market over the past year (+31.78%) and a radical drop in implied volatility (-10%).
The fixed-income market also faced difficulties. Although not performing as poorly as last month, convertible bonds (-1.03%) fell again and reverted to their level of January. After positive returns in April and May, regular bonds (-0.77%) returned to
Merger arbitrage emerged as the strategy most in demand with alternative UCITS investors, with 79 per cent of all respondents planning to increase or maintain their exposure in the coming quarter, according to ML Capital’s latest survey of the growing sector.


ML Capital surveyed a diverse range of active alternative UCITS investors, who collectively manage EUR50 billion and today invest upwards of EUR10 billion into Alternative UCITS products. Questions are aimed at discovering their forthcoming strategy allocations and are asked each quarter to the same respondents, in order to track asset flows between UCITS strategies.


The survey found that merger
AQR Capital Management has launched the AQR Multi-Strategy Alternative Fund (ASANX/ASAIX), the newest addition to its mutual fund family. The new no-load mutual fund began operations on July 18, 2011 with a USD20 million investment by AQR.
The fund’s investment objective is to seek long-term positive absolute return through a broadly diversified portfolio of alternative strategies that are traditionally made available through hedge funds.
The Multi-Strategy Alternative Fund targets low correlation to traditional asset classes and seeks to provide exposure to nine different types of alternative strategies: Convertible Arbitrage, Event Driven (including Merger Arbitrage), Fixed Income Relative Value, Equity Market
