New Commodity Pools Registered March 2017

This is March’s installment of a series of monthly posts about new commodity pool launches.

Highlights

Of note this month:

• A big uptick in the rate of pool registration. This post covers roughly 4 weeks and saw 1005 pools registered, a rate of around 250/week. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 30+ / week also higher than the last post.
• Blackstone alone added 44 pools, while Canyon added 18, and Avenue added 13 over the 4 week period. That’s 60% of the pools listed below.
• Angelo Gordon added 7 pools, Blackrock and Paulson added 6 each.
• Of interest to the systematic trading community, Man Numeric and Two Sigma registered new pools.

Strategies featured in the new pools include:

• Asia special situations, aviation opportunities, energy opportunities (all from Avenue).
• 3 major complex looking groups of funds from Blackstone – I would love it if someone could provide insight into the objectives of such arrangements.
• Goldentree registered a set of related emerging markets pools.
• Pine River established a set of 3 related volatility arbitrage pools.

Please let me know in the comments if this kind of overview is helpful, or if there is something of particular interest to you that you would like me to address.

Background

A hedge fund is typically registered as commodity pool, and the underlying strategy can often be inferred from the name. New pool registrations give you useful market and competitive information! If nothing else, you may get a heads-up that a competitor is bringing something new to market.

The source of data is the National Futures Association’s (NFA) Background Affiliation Status Information Center (BASIC) website. These posts will form a series parallel to the one I recently started on the largest hedge funds by regulatory assets under management. That series uses data sourced from the SEC’s Investment Advisor Public Depository website.

Around 750 new pools are registered with the NFA each month, so I don’t have space to list them all here. I will limit the table to those pools registered by the largest hedge fund firms. This way you will be able to see the latest product-related strategic moves being made by the biggest players.

Get the Raw Data

The March file is no longer available. The button will deliver the current version.

Contact me to discuss custom research and reporting projects.

Methodology

In order to complete the research for this post, I made use of a script in R using the RSelenium package. I have previously published a post about how to set up RSelenium using the latest version of Selenium, and an earlier post reviewing some of the most useful functions in the package. This package makes it possible to automate the collection of data from websites; the process is called web-scraping.

The NFA assigns pool ID numbers in numerical order. I start with the most recently identified pool and increment the pool ID, then search in BASIC for that pool. If the pool is found, I record the name(s) and ID(s) of the Commodity Pool Operator(s). I also check for the date the pool ceased trading futures or ceased trading altogether, to ensure I do not include dead pools. I keep going until I run out of pools (I check at least 100 successive pool IDs have no pool associated with them).

Finally, for the purpose of this post, I purge the list of pool operators who do not appear on my 100 largest hedge funds master list. Note that this list includes about 350+ firms who are affiliated with the various large hedge fund companies.

Image Source: Matthew Bowden