Portfolio analytics and intelligence platform Novus has partnered with Thalia, a provider of hedge fund investment solutions based in Switzerland with USD1.8 billion in assets under management and advisory.
Transparency within hedge funds has significantly increased since the financial crisis, with approximately 70 per cent of hedge funds reporting exposures and attribution along several key categories and many more aggregating portfolio statistics on a monthly basis. In addition, 20 per cent of funds go as far as reporting position-level information to their investors on a monthly basis.
Unlike traditional performance management systems, Novus gives investors the ability to analyse more than returns in order to better understand how their managers are contributing to their overall portfolio in an efficient, intuitive and visually rich way.
"In today's increasingly transparent investing environment, allocators are facing a data overload. Analysing single manager data is complex enough, but when compounded across 50 to 100 managers, investors are at a loss as to how to make the most (or even deal with) such complexity. For an allocator investing or monitoring 70 managers (the typical average for European allocators) this can easily translate into 70,000 data points to be digested yearly. Due diligence must go beyond one-on-one meetings with managers and basic financial analysis. Not knowing is negligence," says Basil Qunibi, chief executive officer, Novus. "In addition to the risk management benefits we provide, our clients have reported gaining an additional three per cent per year on average using our analytics. No doubt, investors clearly have something to gain by having better ways to measure the success of their manager allocations."
"No longer is it enough to simply find the best managers and secure capacity in those funds we have a fiduciary responsibility to analyse an overwhelming amount of data provided by those managers to minimise risks and make strategic decisions on behalf of our clients. Our partnership with Novus allows us to shift our focus entirely to what we do best: invest," says Margrethe Rokkum-Testi, chief investment officer, Thalia.