Solutions
Cloud technology – The scale of a manager's IT infrastructure will largely depend on the type of trading strategy. A quantitative market neutral statistical arbitrage fund is likely going to spend more capital on front-office portfolio management, risk management systems and server storage capabilities than a specialist credit strategy that trades infrequently.
Either way, investors will expect the manager to have a well-oiled machine in place: well-established workflow processes, operational controls, and, as far as possible, front- to back-office system integration.
One of the most popular routes to establishing a sound technology infrastructure is to appoint an outsourced cloud provider.
If one were to sum up the key role of a hedge fund administrator, it is to independently value a fund's assets, allocate those assets correctly to individual investors, and accurately report the allocations to those investors.
Investors want an administrator, not the manager, to independently calculate the fund's assets and monitor the books and records, and to report the fund's NAV. For any new start-up manager, it is worth remembering that when selecting the most appropriate administrator they understand that whilst the administrator will ordinarily perform a range of middle- and back-office functions, at a high level they:
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Choosing appropriate service providers is one of the cornerstones to creating a successful hedge fund business.
All too often, start-up managers try to appoint the big, bulge-bracket names but this is folly. Unless the manager in question has existing relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, and is launching with USD250 million or more in AUM, they will have precious little chance of becoming clients of the industry's leading asset servicers.
So the first thing to consider at the pre-launch phase is: who would be the best service providers to support you relative to the size of your fund?
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Operational due diligence or “ODD” are arguably three of the most important words for any start-up manager hopeful of attracting new investors. Such is the level of expectation among institutional investors today that even if the manager only has USD20-30m in AUM and outsources the CFO function, operationally they still must look and act like a serious outfit.
As Frank Napolitani (pictured), Director, Financial Services at EisnerAmper LLP, comments: “You have to be buttoned up from a front-middle-back-office, legal, compliance and infrastructure standpoint and have answers to things; for example, on the outsourced CFO point, they might want to say, `I
McKay Brothers International (MBI) has added new points of presence in Marseille and Madrid. The new POPs are receive sites for MBI’s private bandwidth subscribers who transmit from Slough-LD4, Basildon and Frankfurt- FR2.
Marseille and Madrid are also distribution POPs for the Quincy Extreme Data (QED) service. The bandwidth and market data services offer the lowest known commercial latency. For example, select futures market data sourced in Aurora, IL is distributed in Marseille in 41.552 milliseconds and in Madrid in 43.978 milliseconds (one-way).
“Marseille and Madrid are key locations for our subscribers,” says MBI managing director Francois Tyc. “Marseille
Imagine Software, a provider of front-to-back office risk and portfolio management to asset managers, investment banks, prime brokers, hedge funds, and institutional investors, has revealed that more than 85 per cent of its clients are using apps or leveraging their financial platform to gain an edge in the market or to streamline operations.
Imagine's cloud offering, launched as the industry's first in 2000, includes the Imagine Financial Platform (IFP). Using the IFP, Imagine's clients and service providers can tap into Imagine's wealth of analytics and data from any device, anytime, anywhere, to solve their most complex problems or to enhance
The London Metal Exchange (LME) has executed the first voice-brokered trade of its LME Steel Scrap contract. The trade was executed on 4 May 2016 by INTL FCStone Ltd on behalf of Stemcor.
The new additions to the LME’s ferrous suite – LME Steel Scrap and LME Steel Rebar – have seen considerable support from the market since their launch in November 2015. 35,990 tonnes (3,599 lots) of scrap and 9,600 tonnes (960 lots) of rebar have been traded since the contracts launched. A new single-trade record of 1,000 metric tonnes (100 lots) of scrap was set in last Wednesday’s
Navigating the increased regulatory requirements of AIFMD has been a costly and resource-intensive exercise for many investment managers over the past few years. Now that the dust has settled on AIFMD, fund managers need to decide on, and implement, the most efficient operating models that allow them to manage assets and raise new capital.
Last month, SEI hosted a panel session in London in conjunction with Duff & Phelps, EFA and leading alternative investment managers entitled “Practical AIFM Management Company Operating Models for Investment Managers”, to specifically address the ways in which managers might wish to establish new European fund
The Portfolio Amalfi™ platform by Nedelma Inc. offers multi-asset, multi-language, multi-currency dynamic reporting and data visualisation, as well as analytical capabilities to the asset management industry. The platform also offers data aggregation tools, portfolio management solutions and a calculation engine. Users can analyse and view data from multiple perspectives using a combination of attributes, formulas and values, with extensive options for dynamic customisation.
Nedelma also has an online investor document repository with document approval workflow and interactive reporting.
"Everybody in the financial industry cares about four factors – improving performance, increasing transparency, raising assets and reducing costs. Our products help
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has gone live with expanded data on over-the-counter (OTC) trading in equity securities is now live, extending the authority’s trading-volume transparency to all of the OTC market.
With this enhancement, FINRA is supplementing the data that it currently makes available on trading by alternative trading systems (ATSs) including venues known as "dark pools" with new data on all other equities volume executed OTC by FINRA members (non-ATS OTC volume). The additional data covers approximately 20 percent of all trading volume in National Market System equities.
"Enhanced disclosure of over-the-counter trading serves the interests of
