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August results show that global hedge funds, using Hedge Fund Research’s HFRX UCITS III-compliant index, made modest gains of +0.17 per cent, bringing them to +0.18 per cent YTD.
BGC Partners, an intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, has completed its first fully electronic Euro interest rate swap transactions over its hybrid voice and electronic execution platform, BGC Trader IRS, which went live on 1 September.
BGC Trader IRS is an extension of BGC’s hybrid technology platform, which has already been deployed and used in over 50 BGC products across credit, rates, foreign exchange, equities and commodities.
The BGC Trader IRS platform incorporates the Volume Match tool, an auction-style functionality which enables customers to transact a wide range of products fully electronically.
Elie El Hayek, managing director, global head
Returns for the Credit Suisse Liquid Alternative Beta Index suggest that hedge funds were negatively impacted by broad market sell-offs in August, although certain sectors showed resilience amid the increased market volatility.
Although the index was down 1.14 per cent in August, it outperformed the MSCI World which fell 4.03 per cent.
Helping to minimise the losses of the index was the Global Macro Liquid Index, which posted slight gains of 0.69 per cent for the month.
Despite the month’s negative returns, the index remains largely positive year-to-date with three of the four sector indices posting gains.
Merger arbitrage remains
KPMG has appointed James Dimech DeBono as an associate partner in its financial risk management practice.
DeBono will be responsible for setting up a team to focus on supporting investment managers, funds and other financial institutions in the preparation of valuations of their portfolios.
The team will comprise quantitative finance and valuation professionals with advanced degrees in quantitative disciplines and significant practical experience in the analysis and valuation of portfolios of “hard-to-value” and illiquid securities.
DeBono trained as an accountant and has 19 years’ advisory experience.
He joins KPMG from Duff & Phelps, where he was managing director for four
The APAC prime brokerage division of Swiss banking giant, UBS, has been a hive of activity of late, with five new executi
New York headquartered Liquidnet, the alternative trading platform that enables buy-side institutions to effectively execute large equity orders en bloc, is busy making inroads into the Asia
Edith Chan, Managing Director for Asian Operations at Fortis Prime Fund Solutions
Man Investments announced this week that it has been chosen by the Korean Teachers’ Credit Union (KTCU)
China’s second-largest asset management firm, E Fund Management, is preparing to launch the mainland’s inaugu
Crescent Financial Partners has purchased a minority stake in IT Trading’s proprietary quantitative trading software for USD3.2m.
The software, which has been under development for nearly a decade, employs a statistical arbitrage trading model.
“In the finance world, arbitrage is commonly known as the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets,” said John Indelicato and Anthony Tuozzo, creators of the software. “Essentially what our software does is automates this process through the use of advanced sophisticated algorithms.”
Russell Armstrong, chief executive and managing director of Crescent Financial Partners adds: “We believe this algorithm is
