Alternative Market Briefing

Benchmark Plus opens its HFRI Equity Long/Short Tracking Fund to outside investors

Thursday, September 20, 2012

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Mike Mikytuck Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York:

Benchmark Plus Management, a private alternative investment firm with $1.6bn in assets under management, has begun accepting outside investors into its Benchmark Plus HFRI Equity HedgeTRAX fund. The fund is designed to track the HFRI Equity Hedge (Total) index, which represents roughly 1,400 equity long/short hedge fund managers. The fund is part of Benchmark's overall equity long/short sleeve, which has $211M in assets.

The fund is designed to provide institutional investors with broad-based exposure to the most widely recognized, but non-investable, equity long/short benchmark. Benchmark Plus utilizes its Real AlphaTM process to evaluate and replicate the index’s return drivers including betas, factors and alpha. From its inception in January 2011, HFRI Equity HedgeTRAX has successfully demonstrated a 99+% correlation to the index.

"When we launched in January 2011, no one had really created a fund tracking the HFRI Equity Long/Short index. HFRI is used by most investors as a comparable benchmark, over the HFRX which our research showed doesn't always track accurately," explains Mike Mikytuck, Managing Director, Benchmark Plus in an interview with Opalesque.

The Index is offered in a limited partnership format with quarterly liquidity, making for a slightly different take on an index product. According to Mikytuck, this format allows them to include an alpha component, realized by underlying allocat......................

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