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The Warsaw Stock Exchange will reduce exchange members fees on transactions on the GPW Main Market and the NewConnect ATS as of 1 November 2016.
The fee reductions for brokers include a reduction of the fixed fee on an order and a reduction of the monthly fee for displaying the best bid/ask prices for retail investors.
The fee reduction is a promotion with no set end date, applicable to all broker orders executed on the Electronic Order Book and as block trades in shares, rights to shares, and ETF units.
The most significant reduction concerns small orders, e.g.
City Index has reduced its spreads across a wide range of FX pairs, with AUD/USD, EUR/USD and USD/JPY now to be priced from 0.5 pts and GBP/USD from 0.8 pts.
The move signals a shift from fixed to variable spreads in a change that promises to offer traders better value than ever before.
"Our decision to tighten our spreads on major FX pairs highlights our continuing commitment to delivering the best possible value to our traders," says Samantha Roady, president of retail at Gain Capital, parent company of City Index. "Moving our FX spreads to variable allows us to
The pace of consolidation within the hedge fund administration space shows no let-up, with MUFJ Investor Services, the asset servicing arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, having just announced its latest acquisition; Rydex Fund Services, a 1940-Act fund administration business formerly owned by Guggenheim Investments.
One of the reasons fuelling this trend is that hedge fund managers and their end investors are looking for a flight to quality, as well as security (from a size and scale perspective).
"They want administrators with a diverse book that can support a wide range of funds and support them as they continue to
In order for the alternative funds industry to evolve one point that needs to be addressed is that the term 'Hedge Fund Administration' is too narrow. Firstly, one cannot avoid a trend towards convergence within alternatives that has steadily gained traction in recent years as hedge fund managers develop more private equity-like fund strategies, and vice-versa; this has resulted in the term 'hybrid fund' being bandied about.
Secondly, as traditional asset managers and asset allocators move beyond the concept of hedge funds as a distinct asset class and move towards portfolio strategies such as risk factor analysis, engineered beta, and synthetic
Conifer Financial Services is one of the world's leading independent fund administrators. It has more than 200 clients representing more than USD110 billion of combined assets under administration (AuA) and has a strong footprint in both the US and Asia (Singapore) following its successful merger with Vastardis Capital in 2014.
Speaking with Hedgeweek, Jack McDonald (pictured), President and CEO of Conifer Financial Services, says he is not surprised by the recent acquisition activity in the industry. In his view, fund administration is, in many regards, a scale game and consolidation will continue over the near term.
"While bigger isn't necessarily
There is plenty of scope for further consolidation in the hedge fund administration space, but only those with a clear strategic vision and a willingness to reinvest in their businesses will likely emerge as tomorrow’s winners.
Consolidation in the hedge fund administration space remains a prominent trend and as investment banks re-assess the profitability of non-core business divisions and small administrators sink or merge in response to market complexity, it is one that is unlikely to end anytime soon.
In the last few years Goldman Sachs has sold its fund administration business, BNP Paribas acquired Credit Suisse's fund administration division,
Datalytyx, a provider of big data engineering, data analytics and cloud solutions in the UK, has signed an agreement with Antuit to create a 100-person offshore delivery and competency centre in Bangalore.
In addition, Datalytyx was named Antuit's exclusive delivery partner for Talend, Cloudera and AWS data engineering services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
The partnership represents a significant market initiative in EMEA by both organisations, supported by the new offshore centre in India. The centre will focus on data integration, quality, management, engineering and managed services related to data operations, while providing a collaborative workspace for
Objecutive has integrated its Fund-Studio portfolio operations and reporting platform with RiskAPI, the on-demand portfolio risk analysis service provided by PortfolioScience.
"The ability to provide VaR reporting and portfolio risk analysis out-of-the-box is a big step forward for us," says Costas Kellas (pictured), CEO of Objecutive. "Fund-Studio's strength of flexible reporting on top of its solid trade management, position keeping and P&L platform has now been rounded out with the addition of dynamic risk reporting, seamlessly integrated into our product."
"RiskAPI is a perfect fit for Fund-Studio," adds Ittai Korin, PortfolioScience's CEO. "Their reporting tools allow rapid, dynamic queries
Linedata, a software solution provider to the investment management and credit industries, has released the latest version of Linedata Icon, the firm’s flagship fund accounting solution.
Linedata says the latest release is part of the continuing programme of functional and technological evolution and builds on the broad and deep functionality offered by Linedata Icon and follows on from recent releases which have introduced new functionality with enhanced instrument coverage and regulatory compliance.
An extension to corporate actions processing allows clients to see both an Accounting Book of Records (ABOR) and an Investment Book of Records (IBOR) and to provide
The Direxion Indexed Commodity Strategy Fund (DXCTX) has received a 5-star Morningstar Rating as of 30 September 2016.
The fund tracks the performance of the Auspice Broad Commodity Index, a quantitative long/flat index that can be exposed to up to 12 major commodities in the energy, metal, and agricultural sectors.
"Most traditional commodity funds provide static long-only exposure to commodities. This limits their potential to contribute to a portfolio's long-term performance because there's no way to get defensive," says Ed Egilinsky, head of alternatives for Direxion. "The long/flat approach makes the fund potentially more adaptive to volatile commodity markets."
