PARTNER CONTENT
By Paul Palackel, Head of AlphaDesk, LSEG – In times of market volatility, hedge funds increasingly need to streamline processes end-to-end. Paul Palackel, Head of LSEG AlphaDesk at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), shares how their solution supports this effort. Their cloud-based system, named Order Management System of the Year at the 2024 Hedgeweek European Emerging Manager Awards, handles multi-asset, multi-currency order and portfolio management.
What is your 2025 outlook for hedge funds?
The overall market is still somewhat muted, with ongoing inflationary pressures and geopolitical uncertainty, but the tide could soon turn. There’s plenty of capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to go back into the market.
Large multi-strategy funds have fared well in 2024, navigating the opportunities across the global financial markets – but many are not raising or returning enough to investors for the fund to stay nimble and show stronger returns. This makes it a little easier for new funds to raise capital, provided their investment strategy is focused on a compelling market opportunity.
There is growing excitement and opportunities arising in the near term, especially with the new US administration. As new policy changes progress, there will be an impact on global markets, resulting in an overall increase in volatility.
All of the above are tailwinds for the hedge fund sector and, by Q2, we expect an increase in launches and activity.
How do vendors such as LSEG help hedge funds capitalise on these opportunities?
Hedge funds can do well in times of volatility, leveraging market neutral strategies or taking a multi-strategy approach and investing in alternative assets such as crypto or private debt. They will, nevertheless, have to be nimble and diversified, and they would expect the same from the systems they use.
LSEG AlphaDesk and LSEG TORA are LSEG’s hedge fund focused solutions for order management, portfolio management, and execution management. They are multi-asset class and provide access to liquidity across geographies, with services such as Outsourced Middle Office and Outsourced Trading Operations enabling clients to quickly scale up – or scale down – as the market evolves.
Furthermore, the solutions are open, customisable, and integrate with all leading vendor solutions in the space, providing clients flexibility to assemble their ideal suite of workflow solutions.
Of course, we have to mention AI – something the buy-side is especially keen on leveraging to boost analytical horsepower and decision-making ability. As one of the leading content and data providers for the financial ecosystem, LSEG’s data and feeds solutions provide world class data for hedge funds who develop their own AI models.
Lastly, LSEG and Microsoft are working to supercharge LSEG’s content, news, and analytics with Microsoft’s AI capabilities, within our flagship LSEG Workspace application and integrated into the Microsoft Office suite – which also seamlessly integrates with AlphaDesk and TORA.
How does the LSEG AlphaDesk team attract and retain talent?
It’s an exciting time to be part of the AlphaDesk team. The product is rapidly evolving and so is our global customer base; it doesn’t hurt that we won a few industry accolades recently.
Our team is unique in that it operates with the speed and agility of a startup, but with the support of the infrastructure and resources of LSEG. Diversity and inclusion are core values of LSEG, and accordingly, AlphaDesk.
We are continuing to grow our teams in London, Toronto, and Singapore, as well as capitalise on talent pools in new locations like Romania. We have ambitions to be one of the world’s great companies and a great place to work. Diversity at all levels of the organisation, with inclusive mindsets where everyone has equitable access to opportunities, is central to this.
It is a long journey, but we have started with small impactful changes, such as taking steps to understand internal biases and improve recruitment and promotion processes.
Paul Palackel, Head of AlphaDesk, LSEG – Paul is the global business head responsible for leading the AlphaDesk business, LSEG’s Portfolio and Order Management solution for the buy-side. He joined LSEG (previously part of Thomson Reuters, Financial division) in 2009. Over the past 15 years at LSEG, Paul has worked across roles in Corporate Strategy, Business Operations & Planning and Business Management. In 2019, Paul led the acquisition and integration of AlphaDesk into the LSEG organisation and has continued to manage the business, driving business growth across all three regions.
