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Practitioners from Guernsey’s fiduciary sector are reporting that business opportunities for them in the Asian market are better than ever following the island’s latest delegation to the region.
A team of officials and industry leaders from Guernsey’s finance industry have recently returned from a three-centre visit to Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Peter Niven, chief executive of Guernsey Finance, the promotional agency for the Island’s finance industry, says: “The delegation was extremely valuable. Not only have we made progress establishing the Guernsey brand in Singapore and Hong Kong but in Shanghai particularly we really made significant strides at reinforcing
Custom House Global Fund Services, an administrator specialising in alternative investment, hedge funds and funds of funds, has made two additions to its global marketing efforts.
David Barry has rejoined as head of sales and marketing for UK, Europe and the Middle East from the firm’s Dublin office.
John Higgins joins as head of sales and marketing for the Americas and is based in Chicago.
They both report to chairman Dermot Butler who oversees marketing and sales globally.
Barry and Higgins will be responsible for increasing the firm’s footprint in their respective regions through a variety of channels
Otkritie, a Russian brokerage which has doubled in size in the last year, has appointed two Russia and CIS market figures to its executive team.
Former Troika Dialog UK chief executive Howard Snell (pictured) has joined Otkritie as a London-based director. He will assume responsibility for the firm’s UK business strategy, and will also have corporate and investor relations responsibilities.
Additionally, Nicholas Richmond has joined Otkritie as director and head of equity trading, based in Moscow.
Snell was responsible for launching Troika’s UK and European business in 2003. At Troika, he headed the UK subsidiary which conducted European equity
The Alternative Investment Management Association has reiterated its support for the registration of hedge fund managers in the US and for the reporting of systemically relevant information by larger managers to national authorities in the interests of financial stability.
The move comes as the bill that will require hedge fund managers operating in the US to register with and be supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission won bi-partisan support from the House Financial Services Committee.
The Private Fund Investment Advisers Registration Act 2009 will make the registration of hedge fund managers in the US mandatory for the first time.
Hedge funds are on track for one of their best years since the Hennessee Group started monitoring performance since 1987, according to a study by the group.
The Hennessee Hedge Fund Index is up 20.9 per cent through September relative to the 17.0 per cent gain for the S&P 500 Index.
Consistent with longer term results, hedge funds managed to protect capital during the market sell-off in early 2009 and have participated in a good portion of the market rally since March.
In addition to strong performance, the Hennessee Group is encouraged by the slowdown in redemptions which is restoring
As institutions in the UK and Continental Europe picked up the pace of their hedging activity last year, European markets for highly liquid flow equity derivatives products expanded, according to the results of Greenwich Associates’ 2009 European Equity Derivatives Investors Study.
Overall, the percentage of European institutions using options products increased to 78 per cent in 2009 from 66 per cent in 2008. This pick-up in institutional demand resulted in an increase in the overall volume of options product traded last year, as measured by the amount of commissions paid by institutions for these trades.
The equity options commission pool
Ticonderoga Securities, an institutional broker dealer, has launched its equity derivatives group led by Vuk Bulajic, an industry veteran with a track record of launching and building equity derivatives businesses.
The new group will further diversify Ticonderoga’s product offerings, which was recently expanded to include institutional equity research.
As head of the equity derivatives group, Bulajic will focus on building out the platform to deliver unique and valuable offerings.
“We are extremely pleased to be able to launch our Equity Derivatives Group with such an experienced and knowledgeable leader as Vuk,” says Shawn McLoughlin, chief executive and co-founder of
Prime Source, NYSE Euronext’s independent asset valuation service, has added Evolution Securities as a closing price contributor to its service.
Evolution Securities is a UK independent investment bank and subsidiary of The Evolution Group, a FTSE 250 UK-based investment bank and private client investment management group.
As part of Evolution Securities’ ongoing commitment to support market transparency and provide reliable valuations metrics, it will be providing closing prices, via the Prime Source service, for a range of financial products including fixed rate ABS, corporate and sovereign credit and inflation linked bonds in the UK, Europe and North America.
Prime Source
BNY Mellon has completed the acquisition of Insight Investment Management from Lloyds Banking Group.
Based in London, Insight Investment specialises in liability driven investment solutions, active fixed income and absolute return. Its clients include some of the UK’s largest pension schemes, corporates, insurance companies and local authorities, along with a growing number of non-UK clients and some of the best known financial services and intermediary companies.
Insight Investment’s assets under management, net of identified internal assets that will be retained by another part of the Lloyds Banking Group, are approximately USD133bn (GBP83bn).
With this acquisition, BNY Mellon will have more
Dow Jones Indexes and UBS Investment Bank have published the new target weightings for the Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index that will become effective in early January 2010.
The commodities with the highest target weights are crude oil (14.3 per cent), natural gas (11.6 per cent), soybeans (7.9 per cent) and copper (7.6 per cent).
The target weights are determined in accordance with construction rules described in the Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index Handbook. These rules combine liquidity and production data in a 2:1 ratio, subject to further requirements as to diversification and minimum weightings.
The resulting weights will be used to
