Latest News
While some of the froth surrounding managed accounts is gone, investors have an ever-broadening range of options to choose from, says Marion Mulvey (pictured), EMEA Head of Alternative Investments Global Transaction Services, Citi, and Lou McCrimlisk, EMEA Head of Relationships, Prime Finance, Citi.
Turn back the clock nine months and everyone involved in the hedge fund industry was talking about managed accounts. Investors were still reeling from the double whammy of the post-Lehman liquidity crisis and the Madoff scandal. Trust in hedge fund managers was at an all-time low. Focus turned to managed accounts as a structure by which the
Butterfield Fulcrum, an independent alternative fund administration company, has partnered with MindTree, a global IT solutions company, to deliver technology solutions for the alternative fund administration industry.
Butterfield Fulcrum has deployed technology to provide greater flexibility, transparency and control to its customers who include hedge funds, fund of funds, managed accounts, private equity funds and real estate funds.
The most recent step is the firm’s proprietary enterprise management system, a technology application developed in collaboration with MindTree that tracks and controls all customer operations at Butterfield Fulcrum’s offices in eight countries.
“In the complex and highly sophisticated segment of financial
Eurex has expanded its cooperation with the European Energy Exchange, allowing customers to trade and clear EEX power derivatives via their existing Eurex access.
The new products in the cooperation comprise Phelix Base futures and Phelix Peak futures as well as options on Phelix Base futures.
Eurex says: “Thanks to their high level of liquidity, Phelix derivatives are attractive European benchmark products for Eurex participants and complement perfectly the existing offering of emission rights contracts.”
Eurex participants will be able to trade Phelix derivatives futures and options via a simplified admission process, as with the existing cooperation in
FBR Capital Markets, an investment bank serving the middle market, has expanded its European institutional brokerage, a unit of its London-based subsidiary Friedman, Billings, Ramsey International.
David Abraham and Blake Hill have joined the firm as director, institutional sales, and Alfredo Mujica and Daniel Tully have joined as director, equity sales and trading.
The additions complement the growth of the firm’s European equity research platform.
"We continue to pursue an aggressive, organic growth model for our London-based
European operations," says Timothy H. Burns, president and chief executive of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey International. "The additions to our institutional sales and trading
Financial Risk Management, a global fund of hedge funds group, has launched FRM Principia, a new approach to serving distribution partners and their client base of sophisticated high net worth investors and smaller institutions.
FRM Principia represents a new generation of fund of hedge fund products that aim to set the highest standards in the distribution marketplace, backed by FRM’s institutional expertise and its rigorous investment process.
FRM Principia products will provide detailed monthly reports giving investors transparency and insight into the drivers of returns, monthly or better liquidity and no performance fees.
Blaine Tomlinson (pictured), founder and
Northern Trust has launched a set of compliance monitoring capabilities that will enable clients to monitor their investments in real time according to their own investment guideline criteria.
Criteria can be created to monitor key aspects of holdings within hedge funds, such as the level of portfolio diversification, liquidity risk in the fund, investment strategy and performance attribution.
Benefits include increased automation, transparency and timeliness of information, enabling clients to assess portfolio investments more quickly and in more detail, and to identify areas where the portfolio is breaching guidelines so that action may be taken if necessary.
This is
ABC Quant has released Quant Suite 2009, an analytic platform offering solutions for hedge fund risk assessment and portfolio construction.
Quant Suite applications cover the broad range of aspects of hedge fund risk management and asset allocation including:
• Risk-return valuation across hundreds of metrics including the VaR derivatives and higher moments;
• Non-linear portfolio optimisation over various objective functions;
• Multi-factor return-based style analysis;
• Peer group comparison analysis;
• Tools for constructing custom evaluation metrics; and
• Flexible screening filters and hedge fund universe subset creation
Quant Suite has been designed for institutional investors, endowments, and medium-to-large hedge fund-of-funds.
The platform offers the access
Managed futures struggled in October as stock market trend reversals and a surge of non-directional volatility compromised many trading models, according to a report by Lipper Tass.
Nevertheless, some discretionary managers, fundamental-driven mean reverting strategies, and carry-trade models were profitable in October, posting positive returns at the end of the month.
The strategy posted a negative 1.41 per cent on average for the month, a minus 0.97 per cent since the beginning of the year, and a positive 3.85 per cent for the rolling 12-month window in US-dollar terms.
The degree of dispersion among individual fund returns increased from the
ConvergEx, a provider of investment and execution technology solutions to institutional clients, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire NorthPoint Trading Partners.
With this acquisition, ConvergEx will offer small and medium sized hedge funds access to a full range of boutique prime brokerage services through NorthPoint’s service model and clearing and custody agreements.
The deal is expected to close in the near term. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
"ConvergEx has well-established execution and technology relationships with many of the world’s large hedge funds and we understand the nuances of what hedge fund managers need to succeed. This
Lyxor Asset Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Societe Generale, has hired Michael Bernstein to further develop its relationships with US based consultants and institutional investors.
He will be based in New York and report to Lionel Erdely, Lyxor’s chief executive for the US.
Bernstein was previously the head of North American marketing for FRM Americas, where he served as lead relationship manager and marketed hedge fund strategies to the firm’s North American clients, which included several of the top pensions and endowments in the US and Canada.
Lyxor AM recently took over the assets of SG Asset Management’s US alternative
