New Commodity Pools Registered April 2017

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

Highlights

Of note this month:

• A big slow down in the rate of pool registration. This post covers roughly 26 calendar days and saw 391 pools registered, a rate of around 105/week – much lower than the 250/week we saw last time. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 9/week, way below the 30+ we saw in the last post.
• Wellington was most active setting up 6 new opaquely named pools.
• Tudor looks like it is re-jiggering things having set up a series of 7 trading LPs.
• GMO has established a fund aiming to capitalize on climate change.
• AQR has added another offshore style premia fund, presumably a feeder.
• In a similar vein, Goldman has established a customized risk premia pool.

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 run in parallel with my other series on biggest hedge funds by regulatory assets under management. That series uses data sourced from the SEC’s Investment Advisor Public Depository website.

Between 400 and 800 new pools are registered with the NFA each month, so I don’t have space to list them all here. I limit the table to those pools registered by the largest hedge fund firms. This way you can see the latest product-related strategic moves being made by the biggest players.

Get the Raw Data

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

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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: David di Veroli on the Unsplash website.