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The joint venture between CLS Group and Traiana, an Icap company, to provide trade aggregation services to participants active in the over-the-counter FX market has gone live.
The service, known as CLSAS, aims to reduce operational risk, lower post trade costs and rationalise and consolidate legacy post-trade processes throughout the global FX markets.
Only aggregated trades will need to be processed and settled in CLS, providing settlement risk elimination whilst alleviating the processing burdens on participating banks by 90 per cent or more.
Operating within the CLS regulatory framework, the supporting technology for the system is provided by Traiana Harmony.
A group of investment funds has filed a lawsuit against Porsche Automobil Holding and two of Porsche’s former executives, Wendelin Wiedeking and Holger Haerter, seeking to recover over USD1bn in losses suffered as Porsche attempted a takeover of Volkswagen in 2008.
The complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan, explains in detail how Porsche manipulated the price of VW stock as it secretly accumulated control over almost all of VW’s freely traded shares, and then, after it achieved control, triggered a massive short squeeze.
Porsche released billions of euros worth of shares into the short squeeze for its own profit.
Asset Management Finance, an investment firm focused on the global asset and wealth management sectors, completed four new investments in December totalling approximately USD200m in invested capital.
These transactions bring AMF’s total capital invested to more than USD500m.
“We concluded 2009 with a flurry of exciting investments continuing our momentum at Asset Management Finance,” says Brian D. Finn, chief executive officer. “In a single month, we completed our first pure equity investment, our first investment in a private equity firm, our first European investment, and our first investment in a credit hedge fund manager. These new investments have not only
The Austrian Government intends to hold its third EU allowance auction on 23 March for 300,000 EUAs, within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, on the Climex Platform.
For compliance companies under the EU ETS it is opportunity to become acquainted with an allocation auction held in the same format as the auctions organised in phase III of the EU ETS are likely going to be: single round, closed order book and a single clearing price.
The auction will be exactly the same as the previous two auctions; the competitive auction with 200,000 EUAs for sale and the non-competitive auction
Hugh Young, managing director of Aberdeen Asset Management Asia believes that Asia will lead global growth in 2010, pulling other emerging markets along with it.
Whilst developed countries increasingly suffer the effects of fiscal indebtedness, Asia will continue to decouple as domestic demand grows and reliance on exports is reduced.
That is not to say that if the West experiences a relapse, Asia will not be affected. Regional economies still depend to a degree on demand from the West for their manufactured exports, as well as for inward fixed and portfolio investment. That dependence is best reflected in the
Australian hedge funds rose by 1.11 per cent in December taking their return for the year to 17.41 per cent, according to Australian Fund Monitors.
Equity based funds rose by 2.08 per cent in December, up 24.66 per cent for the year, while non-equity based funds fell 0.69 per cent, returning 7.94 per cent in 2009.
The ASX lost more than 20 per cent over the past two years, in spite of climbing around 50 per cent in 2009.
Absolute Return funds finished 2009 on a positive note, up 17.41 per cent for the year, and cementing 2009 as one
After a positive third quarter managed futures managers erased their previous month’s strong result, ending December in negative territory, according to a report by Lipper Tass.
The strategy fell 3.80 per cent in December, almost cancelling out November’s gain, and fell 1.44 per cent for the fourth quarter.
Despite managed futures being the best performer for 2008, in 2009 the strategy was hammered by a lack of clear market direction and a surge of non-directional volatility.
As a result it was 2009’s second worst performing strategy (-3.17 per cent) after dedicated short bias (-24.44 per cent), according to the Lipper
In the wake of the investment scandals, market dislocations and regulatory scrutiny of the past year, transparency and liquidity risk have surpassed poor performance as the top concerns for institutional investors investing in hedge funds, according to a survey from SEI in collaboration with Greenwich Associates.
The survey report, entitled "The Era of the Investor: New Rules of Institutional Hedge Fund Investing," points to a need for hedge fund managers to institutionalise responses to transparency demands and to demonstrate clear sources of alpha to retain and gain assets among an increasingly demanding institutional investor base.
The survey revealed
Total volume in NYSE Liffe’s AEX-index daily and weekly options has now passed 20 million contracts.
Designed with short-term trading strategies in mind, the contracts were launched in March 2008 and May 2006 respectively and are traded on the Amsterdam market.
Daily and weekly options cost less to trade than longer-dated alternatives.
The short term option contracts were developed in close cooperation with market participants.
Hans Pieterse, managing director, Optiver Europe, says: “The volumes in daily and weekly AEX options confirm the model by which liquidity providers like Optiver, flow providers and NYSE Liffe have worked together to provide successful
US President Barack Obama’s call last Thursday for banks benefiting from a public safety net to be barred for “owning, investing in or sponsoring” private equity and hedge funds as part of wider strategy to curb excessive risk-taking by financial institutions that have benefited from public support, could have broad implications for the alternative investment industry well beyond the borders of the US.
By no means all of those prospective implications are negative. But so broad – and in some respects so vague – are Obama’s prescriptions that it’s far from clear what concrete measures they will lead to.
