New Commodity Pools October 2017

This is October’s installment in a series of posts about new commodity pool launches. This post covers August and September, 2017. The data was collected on October 4, 2017.

Highlights

The rate of pool registrations was around 121 per week over the last two months, picking up a little from June and July’s 103/wk, actually exceeding the highest rate of 120 we saw back in March. This post covers roughly 11 weeks and saw 1330 pools registered. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 48/week, way above the 30+ we saw in March. However, I improved my cross-referencing process to identify members of affiliated groups with large AUM (>$10bn) so this may explain a large part of the jump.

Firms Establishing a Large Number of Pools

• Alpinvest with 25 real-estate related pools.
• BlackRock with 28, including a set of target-date funds and some Ishares products.
• Franklin advisers with 22 pools in support of their “Franklin FTSE” ETF product range.
• Goldman Sachs with 24 pools, of interest, there were 6 “ActiveBeta” products.
• Invesco registered 28 pools, including some PowerShares “PureBeta” products, plus a slew of what looks like defensive funds.
• Jackson National with 24 pools, most appear to be white label type products unless they are constructed off other firms indices.
• KKR established 28 pools.
• Blackstone went gonzo establishing 66 pools, many included the words “tactical” and “credit alpha” in their names.
• T Rowe Price was up there with 45 pools, nearly all target date funds.

News About Famous Hedge Fund Management Firms

• Angelo Gordon added a couple more energy related master-feeder structures.
• AQR added 10 pools – perhaps some new risk premia products in the pipeline.
• Bridgewater registered 4 new pools including an “All-Weather China” fund.
• Davidson Kempner have 3 new distressed opportunity pools.
• GAM, via their subsidiary Cantab Capital, put up 3 new “systematic discovery” pools.
• RenTech has a couple of new pools associated with their famous Medallion fund.
• Tudor has a new master-feeder structure with the name “Maniyar Macro”.
• Wellington registered 5 pools, one of which seems to have an India focus.
• Also appearing on the list: Marshall Wace, Millennium, Nephila, Pershing Square, Man Group, Lansdowne, Goldentree, and Graham.

While not visible in the table below, which is an abstract of the full table I make available, Systematica added a couple of pools too.

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.

Primer on Hedge Fund Structure and Data Sources

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 largest hedge funds master list. Note that this list includes 7000+ firms who are affiliated with the 500 or so largest hedge fund companies.

Image Source: My own photo taken at the 2014 Dale Chihuly exhibit in Denver Botanical Gardens.