Firm Profile: Pension Fund, Alternative Investments, Traditional Assets
Product: Quant Suite, Risk Shell
ABC Quant Client Since 2010
The US-based Pension Fund (The Fund) offers numerous plans to support retirement income and focuses on traditional investments: equities, fixed income, real estate, and risk parity. A small part of the Fund's portfolio is allocated to alternative investments. The Fund was established in 1968 and has about US$9B in assets under management. Their team includes 11 investment professionals.
The Fund was looking for a risk assessment framework with the particular focus on multi-asset portfolios. While the Fund's investment team employed a number of traditional risk management systems, none of those could handle complex portfolios of traditional assets and alternative investments. Risk Shell was a logical choice for the Fund since it could offer a solution of managing multi-asset portfolios for single plans as well as aggregated positions.
New To Alternative Investments
"We are different than alternative investment boutiques or investment banks," said the Lead Portfolio Manager of the Fund. "All our managers are experts in equities, fixed income and real estate, but not in hedge funds. We have been outsourcing hedge fund research and risk management to an external adviser for many years, but now decided to keep everything in-house."
ABC Quant provided not only the analytical platform, but also a tailored educational course covering hedge fund risk management and portfolio construction. "Quant's training and tutorials are great help to us in achieving our goals to manage alternative investments by our own management team. I do not know other companies offering the same depth of training as ABC Quant," said the CIO of the Fund.
Responsive Service
Being new in alternative investments, the Fund's team needed help in setting up their own due diligence process as well as constructing multi-asset alternative portfolios. That is why ABC Quant offered unlimited consulting services on an as-needed basis. "We have been pleased with the ABC Quant consulting program. All our requests get resolved within a few hours. I am confident that any questions we may have will be answered within a timely manner, when we need it," said the Lead Portfolio Manager.