New Commodity Pools January 2018

This is January 2018’s installment in a series of posts about new commodity pool launches. This post covers October, November, and December, 2017. The data was collected on January 13, 2018. Happy New Year!

Highlights

The rate of pool registrations was around 140 per week over the last three months, picking up from August and September’s 121/wk. That’s the highest rate I have seen since I have been running this series, and is pretty surprising since it includes the US Thanksgiving and year-end holiday periods.

This post covers roughly 13 weeks and saw 1825 new pools registered. The big name firms in total were registering pools at a rate of 35/week.

Firms Establishing Over 20 Pools

• New Hampshire Higher Education Savings Plan Trust 62 Pools.
• Arizona Family College Savings Program Trust Fund: 36 Pools.
• Delaware Qualified Tuition Savings Plan Trust: 36 Pools.
• Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority Higher Education Savings Plan Trust: 36 Pools.
• Point72 Asset Management LP: 23 Pools. Steve Cohen getting ready to re-enter the world!
• MassMutual Select Funds: 21 Pools.
• Wells Fargo Bank NA as Trustee: 22 Pools. Some index funds and some target date funds.
• The Vanguard Group Inc.: 20 Pools. Various index funds.

Would love it if someone could explain to me what those first four are all about! Strangely, the naming pattern for the funds is similar among all four. “Fidelity” crops up a lot. Curiouser and curiouser.

News About Famous Hedge Fund Management Firms

T Rowe Price, Anchorage, JP Morgan, Carval, Alliance Berstein, Ares Capital, Blackrock, Angelo Gordon, Vanguard, and Invesco were the most active last month. They all established 10 or more pools each.
DE Shaw, AQR, and Man Group added a small number of pools.
I have to say, there was nothing that looked super-interesting (other than a 3X Bond Bull pool, which seems like a quick way to lose money if interest rates continue to creep up!). Perhaps you can spot something I have missed – let us know in the comments.

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: Pamukkale Thermal Pools by Getye1