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Hewitt Associates, a consulting and outsourcing company, says hedge funds should no longer be seen as just an alternative asset class and urges pension funds to consider long/short equity managers as part of their overall equity allocation.
Guy Saintfiet, senior hedge fund researcher at Hewitt Associates, says: “We have been a strong advocate of the use of hedge funds in pension fund portfolios for a number of years and have recently seen increased demand for hedge funds from our clients. We believe that the step to include long/short equity is a natural progression from, and complement to, unconstrained active equity
Financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman has expanded its EMEA securities lending team with the addition of four senior executives.
David Lewis, Jacqueline Waller, Céline Emond and Samantha Peppiatt have joined BBH’s team to focus on relationship management and business development activities across the EMEA region.
"The shift in beneficial owner sentiment towards customised, intrinsic value lending programs is leading to significant new business for our program across regions. Our EMEA business in particular has grown significantly in recent months as beneficial owners move into our program from exclusive arrangements and other agent lending programs," says Keith Haberlin, head
Riley Paterson Investment Management, a Singapore-based hedge fund manager with USD340m of assets under management, has implemented Paladyne Portfolio Master as its fully-hosted front-to-back-office solution.
Paladyne Portfolio Master offers a combination of order management and portfolio management functionality, and may either be installed on-site or delivered via Paladyne’s hosting platform, Paladyne ASP.
Riley Paterson uses Paladyne Portfolio Master for order management, compliance, real-time profit and loss monitoring, portfolio management, NAV reporting, and automated reconciliation to its prime brokers.
Additionally, Paladyne Portfolio Master includes out-of-the-box integration with Riley Paterson’s direct execution brokers and their preferred execution management system, Bloomberg EMSX.
Paladyne’s
Asian institutions’ appetite for external asset management is growing slowly with the recovery in global markets, but new research from Greenwich Associates reveals that many institutions across Asia are making a longer-term commitment to managing assets in-house.
These conclusions are drawn from the results of Greenwich Associates’ 2010 Asian Investment Management Study, in which 84 of the largest institutional investors in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and other Asian countries were interviewed.
The institutions participating in the study together manage some USD5trn in assets, a sum that was roughly unchanged from 2009 to 2010.
Because central banks
GlobeOp Managed Services will partner with business communications provider Intermedia to offer Outlook 2010 desktop functionality through Microsoft Exchange as a hosted service.
The enhanced private cloud service enables GlobeOp to offer clients the benefits of full collaboration functions of Microsoft Outlook 2010, without client installation or maintenance.
Partnering with Intermedia, the world’s largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, also facilitates hosting Blackberry Enterprise Server and Windows SharePoint, delivering wireless synchronization and workspace sharing services respectively.
According to a June 2010 InformationWeek survey, 58 per cent of business IT professionals are either using or planning to use private clouds to cut
RWC Partners’ Ajay Gambhir is set to launch the RWC Europe Absolute Alpha Fund, a Ucits III pan-European long/short equity fund.
The new fund will launch at the end of July following the launch of Mike Corcell’s RWC US Absolute Alpha fund, which has raised over USD400m since its launch in October 2009.
RWC Europe Absolute Alpha Fund will be managed using Gambhir’s long-running European long/short investment strategy, while the Ucits III structure brings the additional benefit of daily liquidity and share classes that will have local registrations in a number of European countries.
Gambhir, who started managing European long/short
Following the initial launch of the HSBC Ucits AdvantEdge Fund in October 2009, the fund has now successfully completed the passporting process for France and Germany.
Ucits funds operate under a passport system, which means that they can be offered for sale throughout the entire European Union once they have been authorised in one member state.
The fund currently offers six share classes for general distribution. Four share classes were launched in October 2009: Euro, US Dollar, Euro Institutional, and US Dollar Institutional. The Sterling and Sterling Institutional share classes were launched in January 2010.
All these share classes
Qbasis Invest, the Liechtenstein-based managed futures specialist, is expanding its London marketing operations with the appointment of Alistair Evans as director sales, UK.
Evans has eight years’ experience in the alternatives sector.
Most recently, he was partner and co-founder of GLS, a hedge fund marketing business.
Prior to that he worked at UBS and Merrill Lynch, where he focused on the intermediary and wealth manager market.
He began his career in 2002 at the US investment bank Laidlaw and then moved to the ECU Group, a former subsidiary of ED&F Man.
Evans will concentrate on promoting Qbasis’ new exchange-traded fund,
Law firm Ashurst has hired Nick Terras to join its derivatives products group.
Terras specialises in hedge funds, Ucits funds, exchange-traded funds and related derivatives.
His clients include European and US financial institutions as well as hedge funds and mutual funds.
Terras joins Ashurst from Schulte Roth & Zabel International where he was a partner in the investment management group.
Prior to joining Schulte Roth, Terras was a partner and co-head of structured finance and investment funds at another US firm.
Erica Handling, Ashurst’s head of structured finance, says: "Nick is widely regarded as a leading adviser in respect of
Koger, a provider of software and services for the fund administration industry, has launched the next version of NTAS, its transfer agency solution.
NTAS 10.1 introduces a number of enhancements and new features that expand the tools available to the administrator making the fund administration process faster and more automated.
“We are very pleased with the enhancements and new features in NTAS 10.1. Our customisable workflow screens make NTAS even more user-friendly,” says Ras Sipko, chief operating officer. “Introducing integrated real time accounting capabilities of IKAS into NTAS for the first time makes NTAS that much comprehensive in its reach
