Topwater: A risk-based managed account platform can remove a lot of the business risk Bryan D. Borgia

Bryan D. Borgia, Principal, at Topwater Capital Partners LLC, an investment manager based in South Norwalk, CT, contracts managers to run capital on managed accounts. Those managed accounts, which are "risk-based," go on a platform, while Topwater takes care of the setting up and the paperwork. As the environment for new fund managers is harsher, many are happy to find a home in a platform, and so Topwater benefits from that.

Furthermore, some of the portfolio managers are simply not as good managing a business as they are at running money, Borgia said in an Opalesque TV interview last year. Even if most of them are seasoned individuals, they usually are specialized in the money management side.

Topwater is not a traditional seeder. "We are lumped into the seeding bucket because we can be a fist mover," he explained. Besides, he added, Topwater’s model is very clean, as the firm only makes money when the managers make money.

Borgia said in a more recent interview for New Managers that it is not necessarily the case that smaller and newer managers outperform the large ones (even initially), and that managed accounts are a luxury. Read all about it here:

Opalesque: Please remind us what a risk-based managed account platform consists of.

Bryan Borgia: It is a fund that is set-up very much like multi-strat hedge fund, whereby you are allocating to......................

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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.