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Sophis, a provider of cross-asset, front-to-back portfolio and risk management solutions, has named Jean-Sébastien Py as general manager for South Asia.
Py joined Sophis in 2004 and played a pivotal role in building the Sophis team and client base in Hong Kong.
Moving rapidly through the ranks from front office consultant to senior business consultant, before heading up the business consulting team for Asia, Py is now based in Singapore and has full responsibility for all activity in the region.
Py’s objective is to build Sophis’ presence in South Asia to deliver best practice in terms of consulting, support and
Olivetree Securities, a UK based equities broker, has appointed Jim Cirenza as chief executive of its US subsidiary, Olivetree USA.
Cirenza will be responsible for building the group’s US based business.
He is a senior executive with over 25 years of international experience and extensive business contacts across the UK, Europe and the US.
Prior to joining Olivetree he was global head of securities (equity and fixed income) at Carnegie Investment Bank for eight years, where he was also head of the New York office for five of those years.
Before that he was head of European sales trading in
Trax, Xtrakter’s trade matching and regulatory reporting system, processed 578 million transactions in 2009, reflecting a 105 per cent increase on 2008 figures.
Xtrakter currently processes on average 2.5 million transactions daily on behalf of its user community.
“Trax plays a vital role in reducing risk exposure, facilitating trade matching and settlement and ensuring its many subscribers fulfil their regulatory obligations. This significant increase in transaction volume highlights the value the Trax community receives from the service, its continuing importance as a matching, reporting and settlement facilitator for the capital markets as a whole,” says Yannic Weber, chief executive officer,
Dominion Corporate Group, a provider of offshore management and administration based in Jersey, has added Graeme McArthur as head of funds.
McArthur (pictured) has over 20 years’ experience of the finance sector in Jersey, initially with KPMG and then moving into fund administration with Deutsche Bank and subsequently State Street.
Most recently McArthur was chief executive at Northern Trust Jersey.
Since 2004 McArthur has also been a member of the executive committee of the Jersey Funds Association.
Dominion Corporate Group’s managing director Sue Fossey says: “We are very glad to welcome an individual of such substance and calibre
Adept Capital Partners’ Early Stage Asia Fund recorded a 14.9 per cent increase in value in 2009 with a sharpe ratio of 2.08 for the year.
This makes it a top quartile performer in Asian fund of hedge funds over its two year life to date, according to the EurekaHedge Asian fund of funds database.
The fund’s two year performance ranked 11th out of the 57 funds in its peer group with outperformance versus the MSCI Asia Pacific index of 21.2 per cent in the same period.
The Early Stage Asia Fund invests in Asian focused hedge funds
FletcherBennett Capital, a consulting firm for the hedge fund industry, has appointed Somer Hatano as director of investor coverage for Japan to specifically address the needs of Japanese institutional investors.
Hatano joins the firm with extensive experience covering Japanese investors during her 12 years in the alternative investment industry.
Prior to joining FletcherBennett, Hatano managed her own firm, Alpha Dialogue Advisors, a business development and consulting firm advising hedge funds and private equity funds in raising assets from Japanese investors.
Previously, Hatano worked in the capital introduction group at Morgan Stanley Japan in Tokyo.
In her new role,
Local hedge funds were able to offer investors significantly lower volatility than equity funds in 2009, according to the latest Blue Ink All South African Hedge Fund Composite, which tracks the performance of around 100 hedge funds in South Africa.
According to the BIC, the average South African hedge fund posted gains of 15.67 per cent for the 12 month period to 31 December 2009.
While the JSE All Share Index posted a 32.13 per cent gain for the same period, it did so with degree of volatility (measured using annualised standard deviation) roughly ten times greater than that of
Knight Capital Europe’s order execution service, Knight Link, will begin trading Nordic large-cap securities listed on the Nasdaq OMX Nordic.
Knight Link, a trading model for European equities, will initiate coverage of 75 stocks in Finland, Denmark and Sweden.
“We are very excited to expand Knight Link into the Nordic markets,” says Kee-Meng Tan (pictured), managing director, head of the electronic trading group in Europe. “Our unique model of providing liquidity to both retail and institutional broker-dealer clients on a single platform has been well received in the UK. We saw over USD4bn executed through Knight Link in January and
Opus Fund Services, a hedge fund administration firm, has opened an office in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.
The office will initially focus on client relationship management and business development.
"Fund administration is rapidly becoming a critical component in the relationship between managers, their investors and their capital raising efforts," says Opus president Stephen Giannone. "Our new San Francisco office is an exciting opportunity to continue to develop the Opus brand directly into the west coast market."
The office will be led by the director of west coast sales, Greg Knapp. He has previously worked in a senior
Recent heightened levels of uncertainty have highlighted the need for diversification and may continue to drive investors in search of alternative asset classes, including commodities.
Andrew Karsh, co-lead portfolio manager for the Credit Suisse total commodity return strategy, says the last couple of years have seen macro factors dominate across many asset classes, including commodities.
As market uncertainty declines, Credit Suisse expects commodity-specific factors to re-emerge as a driving factor of prices which should cause inter-commodity correlations to decrease while simultaneously reducing correlations with other asset classes such as equities and fixed income.
Co-lead portfolio manager Christopher Burton adds: "Commodities
