Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Reuters India – Wall Street, where hundreds of commodity traders lost jobs last year as the recession set in, is on a new hiring phase where banks and hedge funds want to pay top dollar but only to a few, highly productive people.
The actual number of hires is unlikely to match the pace seen during the commodities super-cycle from 2003 to 2008, when investment banks ran a maze of desks that handled almost everything in the energy, metals and agricultural space.
MLive.com – The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis. The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.
“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.
Wall Street & Technology – Now that Apple has improved security and enterprise connectivity capabilities for the iPhone 3G, industry specific applications are starting to emerge. One of the first iPhone applications for the securities industry is a tool that provides real-time portfolio management called Lab49 Capital from Lab49, Inc. a technology consulting firm that builds solutions for the financial services.
The application helps buy-side portfolio managers track the performance of their assets in real time, and "slice and dice" positions, P&L and changes in the portfolio across multiple dimensions such as strategy, industry, country and manager, according to Marc Jacobs, director at Lab49. (See a Lab49 Capital ScreenCast demo.)
"For a portfolio manager, they don’t spend all of their time at their desks," Jacobs adds. "But their mind is always ‘where are we right now?’ Allowing portfolio managers to such visibility into their fund is a key aspect that this application provides. Lab49 Capital is inspired by several projects we have going on with a number of firms. Lab49 Capital is a representation of actual work we are doing with some of our clients."
