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The venture draws on the unique skills of each team. PGS, the creator of the Parker FX Index, brings its deep knowledge of CTA and FX managers, its experience in constructing both actively managed portfolios and investable indices comprised of such managers, and its proprietary style mapping system, CTA Style Trax™. The principals of Lockbox, a New York and Greenwich, CT based investment management firm founded by Aaron Ford and Jonathan Ende, have built award-winning derivatives and alternative investment businesses at major investment banks and bring their 40+ years of structuring, institutional money management, proprietary trading, and alternative investment expertise.

The jointly developed product offerings seek to deliver outsized returns with lower risk by using a customized structured solution coupled with a PGS-Lockbox proprietary systematic, volatility controlled, diversified portfolio of “Best of Breed” CTA, FX, and Macro investment managers. The resulting products are targeted to have low to zero correlation to other asset classes and positive performance during market crises. In contrast to most alternative investments, the products will also have very short-term liquidity and a highly preferable custody arrangement.

According to Jonathan Ende, Co-founder of Lockbox, “We are very enthusiastic about our joint venture with Parker Global Strategies. Lockbox Asset Management spent significant time investigating potential partners for this exciting new product, and PGS’s expertise in the FX and CTA space along with their extensive due diligence and research process carried out on each manager is the perfect, synergistic fit.”

Virginia Parker, Managing Member and Chief Investment Officer of Parker Global Strategies said of the products’ underlying new index, “This Index should prove to be one of the most comprehensive rules-based, factor-driven allocation processes available to investors today. The methodology considers trading styles, auto-correlation, mean reversion, risk, quality of a manager’s operations, and more. We are excited to work with Lockbox on this product and eager to share this development with our clients.”

Aaron Ford, Co-founder of Lockbox, added, “Notably missing from most investors’ portfolios is managed futures exposure, which has historically performed as an effective hedge during market turmoil. In our joint effort with PGS, we have developed an innovative, systematic, and easy-to-understand approach to generating outsized absolute returns from the managed futures space in a capital efficient, highly liquid, and risk-reduced manner.”

Based on data from Hedge Fund Research, Inc. (HFR) on alternative investments for 2011, we estimate the managed futures industry had over $300 Billion of assets under management at last year end. Since the financial crisis of 2008, managed futures and macro investments have significantly outperformed other strategies and have become one of the fastest growing subclass within the alternative investment spectrum... Corporate website: Source
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