New Commodity Pools July 2017

This is July’s installment in a series of posts about new commodity pool launches. This post covers June and July, 2017

Highlights

The rate of pool registrations was around 103 per week last month, down from May’s 120/wk, and well below the peak of 120/wk during March. This post covers roughly 55 calendar days and saw 806 pools registered. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 10/week, again, way below the 30+ we saw in March.

Of note this month:

• BlackRock established 20 pools, including an Emerging Markets ex China – you know you going to have a big economy when you are carved out of the emerging market pool! There was also a Global Renewables pool, a volatility fund, a Russell 2,500 pool, and a multi-strat pool.
• Credit Suisse established a new commodity pool.
• Amongst 14 new pools, Goldman Sachs established a couple “Holocene” pools. Not sure what that’s all about.
• AHL registered a “Medium Frequency Equity” pool and an “Enhanced Momentum” pool, and 4 others.
• Marshall Wace has a new 130/30 pool.
• JP Morgan and PIMCO both established 7 new pools.
• Winton has established a single pool named “Cavendish Systematic Fund”. Perhaps they are finally releasing some new product.

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

• Aspect Capital established 3 new pools.
• Systematica registered 8 new pools.
• Dunn launched a new pool, but I think it is for an existing program.

Glancing through the table I can see a couple of the major hedge funds’ pools are slipping through the net, so I will try to update my NFA to SEC cross-reference list to try to ensure the major hedge funds pools appear in the short table presented below.

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.

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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: Ben Dunkley on the FreeImages website.