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State Street has signed an acquisition agreement with Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Italy’s premier banking groups, to acquire its securities services business, ISPSS, for approximately EUR1.28bn (USD1.87bn) in cash at closing.
State Street expects to support the acquired ISPSS balance sheet with approximately EUR560m (USD800m) of additional capital at the closing.
ISPSS is a provider of securities services in the Italian market and has a significant presence in the Luxembourg market.
State Street would acquire the global custody, depository banking, correspondent banking and fund administration portions of the ISPSS business.
In addition, assuming the cash balances in the business are
Calamos Asset Management has named Nick Calamos president of investments and co-chief investment officer and Jim Boyne president of distribution and operations.
Nick Calamos (pictured) previously served as senior executive vice president and also serves as Calamos’ co-chief investment officer.
Boyne previously served as senior vice president and chief operating officer for distribution at Calamos Financial Services, and as senior vice president and general counsel for CLMS and its affiliates.
"Nick has been instrumental in shaping Calamos’ research and investment process over the last 25 years, generating solid long-term performance for our clients," says chairman, chief executive and co-chief investment
SunGard has released a new version of its VPM portfolio accounting solution for hedge funds.
SunGard’s VPM version 9.0 provides hedge funds with an enterprise-level portfolio accounting application that is built on a service-oriented architecture for plug-and-play integration with a firm’s existing applications and scalability.
It also provides a new user interface focused on increasing operational efficiency, simplifying workflows and providing intuitive access.
Denise Valentine, senior analyst at Aite Group, says: “Regulators and institutional clients are fixated on transparency and improved reporting from their asset managers. Recent scandals mean clients have higher standards on reporting – including requiring a rapid
The international derivatives exchange Eurex will offer futures contracts based on particular dividends of individual shares from 11 January 2010.
Eurex will launch dividend futures on the constituents of the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50.
Following the introduction of the index dividend futures on the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50 in June 2008, Eurex is further expanding its offering. For the first time in Europe the pure dividend component of the underlying stocks of a benchmark equity index are available for exchange trading and clearing as a standalone product.
Peter Reitz (pictured), member of the Eurex executive board, says: “The
Triple A Partners and Hatfield Advisors have entered into a joint venture agreement to develop their combined fund distributions business on a global basis.
With immediate effect Hatfield Advisors will change its name to Triple A Partners Australia.
The staff of Hatfield Advisors, led by managing director Damien Hatfield (pictured), will all remain with the business.
The new entity, Triple A Partners Australia, will continue to serve its existing client base in exactly the same way as it has done in the past.
Damien Hatfield joins the executive management committee of the Triple A Partners business.
Hans Tiedemann, chairman of
Despite fears about Dubai’s debt crisis triggering choppy conditions in equity markets toward the end of November, managed futures managers benefited from long equity and commodity-trading exposure and posted the second strongest monthly gain of the current year after May’s.
According to Lipper Tass, both systematic and discretionary managers performed well on average, but high-frequency mean-reversion traders continued to underperform.
The strategy returned a positive 3.10 per cent performance, according to the Lipper Managed Futures/CTAs index—fully recovering from October’s loss, a modest 0.71 per cent gain since the beginning of the year, and a positive 4.07 per cent for the
The November edition of Hedgebay Trading’s monthly index has posited that if 2010 is to see the hedge fund market return to its previous performance levels, then the reduction of underperforming, illiquid assets must be hedge fund investors’ primary concern.
The Hedgebay Global Hedge Fund Secondary Market Index last month showed the continuance of a wide dispersion between the highest and lowest prices at which secondary market users were willing to trade at, further supporting evidence that a two-tiered market is developing.
The November index, which revealed that the gap between highest and lowest trades has widened even further, seems
State Street Global Advisors, the investment management arm of State Street Corporation, has been appointed by Flintshire County Council to run a GBP20m mandate on behalf of the Clwyd Pension Fund.
State Street Global Advisors currently manages more than GBP5bn assets on behalf of 15 local authorities.
The new assets will be invested in the Ssaris Multi-Manager Absolute Return Strategy, an absolute return fund of hedge funds with a target return of three per cent to six per cent over US treasury bills, per market cycle. The strategy combines a convergent approach, one based on fundamental valuation of companies, with
The DM Swiss Equity Asymmetric Fund completed its second year of operation at the end of November 2009.
The fund has outperformed the Swiss equity market by more than 17 per cent p.a. during that time.
Managed by Urs Heinimann and Adrian Peter at Mirabaud & Cie in Zürich, the fund achieved an annualized return of 5.02 per cent with annualized volatility running at 3.78 per cent.
Comparative numbers for the Swiss equity market were -12.27 per cent return and 20.09 per cent volatility.
The maximum drawdown experienced was 3.84 per cent with the fund only experiencing negative monthly returns
HM Revenue & Customs has clarified what constitutes a bank following its announcement on 9 December that it will be implementing a bank payroll tax.
According to Kinetic Partners, HMRC has confirmed that the bank payroll tax is aimed at retail and investment banks and to banking groups and does not apply to non-banking companies outside of banking groups.
The guidance published states that insurance companies, asset managers and stockbrokers, for example, are not intended to be caught.
While draft legislation is not expected until the New Year, HMRC has confirmed that the definition of a bank and banking
