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Barclays Bank has become the latest bank to support the joint venture between CLS Group and Traiana, which provides trade aggregation services to participants active in the over-the-counter FX market.
Barclays Capital joins an initial group of eight banks as a CLS Aggregation Participant in CLS Aggregation Service LLC (CLSAS), comprising BoA Merrill Lynch (NYSE: BAC), Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS), Citibank (NYSE:C), Deutsche Bank (XETRA: DBKGn.DE / NYSE: DB), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L).
CLSAS offers a wide range of benefits for participants, including improving post trade operational
Schroders is to launch a new investment trust, structured as a Guernsey-domiciled closed-ended investment company, which will invest in a range of commodities strategies.
The Schroder Opus Commodity Fund will be managed by Schroders NewFinance Capital, Schroders’ absolute return multi-manager firm. In addition to the investment through a range of active managers, the fund will also comprise a proprietary commodities futures portfolio managed by Schroders NewFinance Capital.
The fund is aimed at outperforming the DJ-UBS Commodity Total Return Index by 6 to 9 per cent per annum (net of fees) over a cycle, with 100 per cent exposure to the
Managed futures lost 0.91% in March according to the Barclay CTA Index compiled by BarclayHedge. Year-to-date, the Barclay CTA Index is down 0.39%.
“Perilous crosscurrents wrought by devastation in Japan, unrest in the Middle East, and higher headline inflation generated turmoil in futures markets,” says Sol Waksman, founder and president of BarclayHedge.
Four of Barclay’s eight CTA indices had negative returns in March, while four indices had gains. The Barclay Diversified Traders Index fell 1.71%, and Systematic Traders were down 1.56%.
“The fallout from mid-month trend reversals in capital and commodity markets hit diversified trend followers harder than other sectors,"
Guernsey lawyers from Mourant Ozannes have assisted in advising BlueCrest on the acquisition by its partners of Man Group’s 25.5% stake in the BlueCrest Group for USD633 million.
The transaction was funded by a senior debt facility arranged by HSBC and RBS, the issue of loan notes and through existing cash resources.
BlueCrest was founded in 2000 and is Europe’s third largest hedge fund manager, with more than USD25 billion of assets under management.
BlueCrest moved its group head office to St Peter Port, Guernsey in April 2010 and is a long-standing client of Mourant Ozannes. The Mourant Ozannes team of
The Scotia Capital Canadian Hedge Fund Performance Index finished March 2011 down 0.09% on an asset weighted basis and down 0.70% on an equal weighted basis. The Index performed in line with North American equities and slightly underperformed global hedge fund indices.
Global capital markets were beset with considerable turbulence in March. Key themes impacting market movements included Japan’s major earthquake, ensuing tsunami and nuclear emergency, continued civil unrest spreading broadly across the Middle East and North Africa, and ongoing concern over fiscal imbalances in Europe. Volatility spiked dramatically following events in Japan, and equity markets sold off heavily into
Total capital invested in the global hedge fund industry exceeded USD2 trillion for the first time in its history, according to data released by Hedge Fund Research, Inc. (HFR).
Total industry assets rose to USD2.02 trillion, an increase of USD102 billion in 1Q11, surpassing the previous record of USD1.93 trillion, set in 2Q08. The current asset level reflects an increase of over 50 per cent from the Financial Crisis low of USD1.33 Trillion in 1Q09. Investors allocated USD32 billion in net new capital in 1Q, the largest quarterly net inflow since 3Q07.
All strategy areas experienced inflows for the
LaSalle Investment Management has partnered with BGC Partners to establish a property derivatives capability for clients. The new offering is expected to be fully operational by spring 2011. Together with BGC, LaSalle will embed the end-to-end systems and processes to empower LaSalle’s fund managers to identify value and execute and monitor trades.
The announcement comes as interest in property derivatives continues to grow with figures showing that trading doubled between Q2 and Q3 2010 to GBP756 million, bringing the year-to-date trading levels to GBP1.5 billion. According to the IPD, the majority of trading activity came in the more mature UK
REYL & CIE, an independent banking group created in 1973, and Samena Capital, an investment group focusing on principal investments in the Subcontinent, Asia, Middle East and North Africa (SAMENA), announced today the creation of a joint venture to integrate complementary business resources. This partnership will combine Samena Asia Managers (SAM), Samena Capital’s profitable and established hedge fund seeding business operating from Hong Kong with REYL & CIE’s wealth and asset management expertise and regulated infrastructure to create a high value proposition for their respective client and investor bases.
The joint venture will capitalsze on the synergies that emerge
Apex Fund Services is to create 50 jobs in Ireland over the next 18 months with the opening of a new office in Dublin. The new office opening is in response to Apex Fund Services rapidly growing client base internationally.
With 21 offices internationally, Apex Fund Services located in Cork 4 years ago, and successfully recruited the highly skilled financial services staff required to grow and scale the business in Ireland. Now having reached its optimum size and with an increasing amount of funds business going through the Irish office, establishing a presence in Dublin was the obvious next
Espen Robak, president and founder of Pluris Valuation Advisors, argues that Black-Scholes and other theoretical valuation models have long failed to value illiquid securities properly, but but their inadequacy is especially an issue today because of the prevalence of illiquid assets, regulatory insistence on fair value and the availability of more accurate methodologies.
Hedge funds frequently use valuation models that produce inaccurate results for illiquid assets, risking accounting irregularities that can result in potential litigation, increasing redemptions and other issues.
For years it has been common practice for hedge funds to use simple theoretical approaches to valuation, of which the
