New Managers February 2013

Focus - Starting out up North

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The Nordic region is not what you would call a hub for new and re-emerging hedge fund managers. However, there is still some activity there among those managers, institutions and investors, and that is what we look at in this article.

If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking, stated The Economist earlier this month. As indeed, the region ranks high economically and socially, and is seen as one that is in the vanguard of government reform. However, the paper says, the Nordic countries' level of taxation still encourages entrepreneurs to move abroad, and London is full of clever young Swedes.

This seems to be the case when in comes to hedge fund managers too. Starting out a hedge fund in the Nordic region is possible and standards are as high as everywhere else. But the environment does not seem to encourage hedge funds start-ups. However, we talked to a couple of Nordic firms where new hedge funds go to: Brummer & Partners and SEB (see also our SEB interview in Seeders' Corner right after this article). We also hear about a new product from RPM that invests in new and small CTAs, and a Norwegian hedge fund manager, who is about to launch a new fund, tells Opalesque why he prefers to be in London.

Evolving CTA manager product

"One development that affects us, like all the other regions, is that the regulatory demands are increasing, which in fact also contributes to the trend that the biggest managers become even bigger. There are fewer start-up hedge funds and, to a certain extent, fewer types of new strategies comi......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.