IT movers and hedge fund groovers

A January survey from NET2S of 29 vendors of portfolio management systems (PMS) has found a “significant shortfall in adequate risk management” among the PMS vendor space, with 56% of those surveyed “failing to provide any form of risk management at all”. And of those providing risk management capabilities, only 33% offer “enough analytics and stress testing capabilities to be considered 'adequate' by NET2S,” according to the group. The report also compared this with the feedback of more than 45 institutional clients worldwide. In other findings only three of the 29 reviewed PMSs offered compliance modules and in the run-up to MiFID’s implementation in November, there was a “noticeable lack of compliance integration among the vendor offerings,” according to NET2S.

StreamBase Systems has launched two complex event processing solutions focused on the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) and algorithmic trading to meet the requirements of “regulatory complexity and soaring market data volumes in Europe.” Barry Morris, chairman and CEO of StreamBase, said, “the introduction of our solution sets for MiFID and algo trading offer our European customers the tools they need to drive best execution and regulatory compliance.”

Nomura Securities has gone live with GL Trade front office system to trade TSE’s JGB futures and options for their prop desk. Nomura Securities plans to expand the system to handle agency business, collecting DMA orders from GLNET to serve clients. Kenji Tsuge of Nomura Securities said “the prop desk will utilise GL TACTICS to take advantage of the algo trading functionality.”

Dow Jones is to launch Dow Jones ‘elementised news feed’ on 2 April, to allow algorithmic trading programs to feed news flows into quantitative analysis models and automated trading programs. The news is delivered in XML-tagged fields, “eliminating,” in Dow Jones’s view, “the need to parse unstructured text, (and) allowing trading models and computer programs to interpret and take action on breaking news in milliseconds.” The development also includes an archive of “more than three years of elementised news for back-testing and statistical analysis of news flow and historical market reactions.” The feed provides data elements for key economic indicators from major countries, according to Dow Jones. The feed will cover public firms in the US and UK, providing earnings, key corporate data and sentiment tagging, signaling whether news is “significant or unexpected.”

The US Loan Market Association has launched a users’ guide to Islamic financeto introduce Islamic facilities to investors who are “not yet fully familiar with structures in the Islamic finance market,” according to the LMA. The principal form of Islamic facility described in the guide is a murabaha facility. Many of the issues addressed in the guide are also relevant in the context of other Islamic financing structures, including ijara facilities and musharakas. The guide was produced with input from a working party of representatives from banks and law firms in the Islamic finance market.

SuperDerivatives, provider of options pricing and revaluations services, has launched an online cross-asset turnkey derivatives platform for hedge funds. The SD-Funds service combines pricing, analytics, trading, risk management and compliance reporting. SD-Funds has pre-trade and post-trade activities covers assets and derivatives classes. From SD-Funds, completed trades can be “directly captured into fund administrators’ and prime brokers’ systems using STP,” according to SuperDerivatives.

Capita Financial Group has appointed Colin Edge as senior manager, business development. With 25 years’ experience, Edge has consulted the investment community for four years. Before this he was marketing director at Close Finsbury and has also worked with Singer & Friedlander and Morgan Grenfell.