Welcome to the Traded Asset Partners blog!
This will be the place for our musings on the financial industry and markets, as well as any news regarding our business.
To start with, we thought it would be informative to write about the background to this venture, and what we’re setting out to achieve. We are two veterans of cutting edge financial firms, who met in the mid-90’s in the hedge fund world and then went on to have very different careers. Matthew stuck with hedge funds, becoming a portfolio manager at an institutional fund of funds, and then going on to partner a CIO launching his own hedge fund. Paula went into the investment bank trading world, working in exotic derivatives, risk management, structured credit and prime brokerage before taking a sojourn at the FSA just when they needed her expertise in the credit crunch. Since then, Paula has been using her experience at banks and brokers to help them manage regulatory and counterparty risks, implementing the swathe of new regulations that have been produced post-crisis.
We decided to form a partnership to take advantage of our complementary skills, as the combination of Paula’s risk and regulatory knowledge with Matthew’s expertise with fund management businesses gives us scope to offer a wide range of services to financial businesses. Our initial focus is surrounding fund launches. To get a fund up and running, either as a new business venture or an existing firm branching into new areas, is complex, costly and time-consuming, with a particularly steep learning curve. The investment strategy and marketing efforts which will actually dictate the success of the fund are often forced to take a back seat while principals are having to deal with a vast amount of information, which is often confusing or conflicting. Added to this is the issue of service providers, where a poor choice can leave the business with major headaches or worse. We can use our knowledge and experience to guide our clients through the process, and we can take on the project management, allowing our clients to focus on the core tasks of managing money and winning clients.
This is an exciting time in the alternative asset management industry, with global hedge fund assets at a new peak of $2.3 trillion as of Q1 2014 according to HFR, and 2013 being the highest amount of capital raised by private equity since 2008, a total of $454 billion according to Prequin. This is in the context of healthy growth in the global asset management industry, as demonstrated by a PWC report this February forecasting global AUM to grow from $64 trillion as of 2012 to $102 trillion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 6%. However, anecdotally it is the largest firms who are taking the lion’s share of this growth, with smaller firms and startups struggling with the burden of increased regulation and client requirements, leading to higher fixed costs and increased risks to business of mistakes in the early days. Traded Asset Partners can help mitigate these risks.
For more information please contact Matthew Griffiths (matthew.griffiths@tradedasset.com) or Paula Haynes (paula.haynes@tradedasset.com).
