New Commodity Pools Registered May 2017

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

Highlights

The rate of pool registrations picked up from around 105 per week last month. This post covers roughly 35 calendar days and saw 601 pools registered, a rate of around 120/week – still much lower than the 250/week we saw in March. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 12/week, more than the 9/week of last month, but way below the 30+ we saw in March.

Of note this month:

• JP Morgan was most active setting up 11 pools.
• Blackrock and Goldman were a close second with 10 each.
• AQR have established yet more alternative style premia pools.
• Angelo Gordon, Blackstone, Cerberus, D E Shaw, Davidson Kempner, Man Group and PIMCO also feature.

While not visible in the table below, which is an abstract of the full table I make available, I note the following:

• Mass Mutual established 53 (!) pools.
• ProShares has set up no less than 10, 4x leveraged pools so you can lose money really quickly long and short large caps, small caps, Nasdaq, Treasuries and Oil. They have a couple European volatility pools to boot.
• Fort LP has established 2 Global Trend pools.
• Kettera Strategies, an SMA platform, established 2 new pools.
• Gemini established 2 new pools for Tulloss Capital Management on its Galaxy Plus SMA platform.
• Sunrise Capital Partners established a onshore / offshore master feeder structure for their Dynamic Alpha Strategy.

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 May 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: Caroline Bertolini on the Unsplash website.