GFIA, a Singapore-based hedge fund consultant, has launched www.FundHub.com, a new website that allows hedge fund allocators to purchase objective research reports on Asian and Latin American hedge funds.
Established in 1998, GFIA is Asia's oldest independent hedge fund research consulting firm. Peter Douglas, GFIA's principal says that the new service, the first of its kind in Asia, is a response to increasing requests from allocators for packaged research on Asian hedge funds.
"While our consulting services appeal to the top-end fiduciary and fund of fund investors who want the flexibility to define their own relationship with us, there is a significant group of allocators looking for a more standardized research service on Asian hedge funds," says Douglas. "The FundHub service will allow us to offer a much wider audience a sample of the high quality work which we've been offering to our existing clients."
Douglas reports increasing interest from allocators in Asian hedge funds, noting in particular the growing number of US-based and fiduciary investors coming through the region who are allocating to hedge funds in Asia for the first time.
"We expect the service to appeal most to medium sized fund of funds, family offices," he says. "However, we've also sold packages to asset management and hedge fund services units of banks."
FundHub currently has a dozen research reports on its site, including reports on nine Asian and three Latin American -focused funds. Douglas expects to add three to four new reports each month, aiming to reach a platform of about fifty funds. Reports will be updated biannually.
"The reports are not intended to replace full due diligence, but will provide investors with an intelligent first cut analysis with quantitative and qualitative information on the hedge funds," explains Douglas. Each report is eight to ten pages long.
Subscribers to the FundHub service will be able to supplement information in the research reports with monthly conference calls with the GFIA team. "Given that our reports are public documents they will naturally tend to be fairly generic. The purpose of these calls is to provide investors with more colour on the funds we produce reports on," says Douglas. "While we won't be producing reports on a manager unless we think he is good, no hedge fund manager is perfect. The conference call will enable investors to discuss risk factors with us in more detail," says Douglas.
