Hedge Fund Software

I believe this post became a web sensation at one point.

One self obsessed lady is looking for a rich man by posting an ad on craigslist:

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:
- Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms
-What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings
-Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?
- Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?
- Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?
- How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults - I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

Here is an awesome response of a man with an obvious financial background (judging by the use of financial terms in his writing)

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament. Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a cr@ppy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful” as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic “pump and dump.” I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

Hope that made you smile :)))

Finance is an area where well-written open-source projects could make a tremendous difference. Therefore there is a quick review of the financial open source projects used and evolving in today’s world of financial software:

QuickFIX/J

http://www.quickfixj.org/

The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is a messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions. FIX is a public-domain specification owned and maintained by FIX Protocol, Ltd (FPL).

QuickFIX/J is a full featured messaging engine for the FIX protocol. It is a 100% Java open source implementation of the popular C++ QuickFIX engine.

Features:

* Free! It costs nothing and has a very liberal open source licence.
* Full source code available (also at no cost).
* Supports FIX versions 4.0 - 4.4, 5.0/FIXT1.1.
* Runs on any hardware and operating system supported by 1.4+ Java SE or compatible VM.
* Compatibility with QuickFIX C++ Java Native Wrapper API (easy to upgrade)
* Java NIO asynchronous network communications for scalability (using Apache MINA)
* Supports embedded SSL with Java 5+
* Provides standard JMX MBeans for FIX engine management
* Easy to embed in existing Java applications.
* Choice of message processing threading strategies
* Communication transports for TCP sockets and VM pipes.
* Metadata-driven parsing and validation.
* Metadata-driven code generation of type-safe FIX message-related classes.
* Metadata API for use at application level (for example, FIX messaging UI).
* Support for protocol customizations (new messages, fields, constraints).
* Session state storage plugins: JDBC, File, SleepyCat/JE, In memory
* Logging plugins: JDBC, File, SFL4J (supports JDK1.4 logging, Log4J, Commons Logging), Console, Composite
* Failover and High Availability.
* Scheduling of session connections.
* Many automated unit and acceptance tests.
* Example applications: Simple Swing order entry UI and a console-based order execution simulator.
* Commercial support available from multiple sources.

QuantLib

http://www.quantlib.org/

The QuantLib project is aimed at providing a comprehensive software framework for quantitative finance. QuantLib is a free/open-source library for modeling, trading, and risk management in real-life.

QuantLib is written in C++ with a clean object model, and is then exported to different languages such as C#, Objective Caml, Java, Perl, Python, GNU R, Ruby, and Scheme. The QuantLibAddin/QuantLibXL project uses ObjectHandler to export an object-oriented QuantLib interface to a variety of end-user platforms including Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc. Bindings to other languages and porting to Gnumeric, Matlab/Octave, S-PLUS/R, Mathematica, COM/CORBA/SOAP architectures, FpML, are under consideration. See the extensions page for details.

Appreciated by quantitative analysts and developers, it is intended for academics and practitioners alike, eventually promoting a stronger interaction between them. QuantLib offers tools that are useful both for practical implementation and for advanced modeling, with features such as market conventions, yield curve models, solvers, PDEs, Monte Carlo (low-discrepancy included), exotic options, VAR, and so on.

The library could be exploited across different research and regulatory institutions, banks, software companies, and so on. Being a free/open-source project, quants contributing to the library would not need to start from scratch every time.

AMQP

http://www.ampq.org/

AMQP is an Open Standard for Messaging Middleware:

Middleware: software that connects other software together. Middleware connects islands of automation, both within an enterprise and out to external systems.

By complying to the AMQP standard, middleware products written for different platforms and in different languages can send messages to one another. AMQP addresses the problem of transporting value-bearing messages across and between organisations in a timely manner.

Messaging and integration is a necessary part of all enterprise systems

• All significant IT efforts include a messaging and integration component (10%-30% of project cost)
• Proprietary middleware has been a source of lock-in, preventing competition in middleware for both quality and cost
• Interoperability is more difficult than it need be

Other open business standards would ideally avoid being founded on proprietary technologies, and use open information and business process models and message formats. However, NO suitable open technology exists to actually send the messages!

AMQP aims to become the de-facto open standard for messaging middleware

Esper

http://esper.codehaus.org/

Esper is a component for CEP and ESP applications, available for Java as Esper, and for .NET as NEsper.

Esper and NEsper enable rapid development of applications that process large volumes of incoming messages or events. Esper and NEsper filter and analyze events in various ways, and respond to conditions of interest in real-time.

More and more analysts start to believe that license based software business models are “pascaleozoic era” relics of the software industry. Though hedge fund software industry does not seem to catch up with the upcoming trend in the software business and continue to ignore open source software as an important part of their business operations.

Why? Why do hedge fund managers prefer paying annual license fees, support fees, one time engineering fees, integration fees for the proprietary systems that suck them into “long term relationship” with their software vendor instead of easy to start and easy to end “one night stands” with open source software projects. Just to get on board and migrate existing operations data to the new software system takes humongous amount of time and, off course, money - that eventually lead to “marrying” software vendor “for better or for worse”.

The answer here most likely lies in the specifics of the hedge fund business, where investing strategies are managers’ bread and butter and are guarded better than detainees in Guantanamo. Hedge  fund managers are very sensitive when it comes to giving someone access to their investing strategies or even worse - making them public.

Would the hedge fund managers benefit from opening their software closets and contributing at least a bit of their technological wealth to the industry in general. My personal opinion - yes they will. Technology, hardware and software, is the major overhead cost in the business after headcount. By committing yourself to a certain proprietary system you are limiting yourself not only legally but also technologically. You are constrained by the technological capacity and innovative potential of your software vendor. Your software vendor in its turn is in the business of making money and you are his “cow to milk” therefore all the new features would come at a price with a three digits per hour price tag.  If hedge fund open source software will take off and become popular with many contributors you would have an access to a much bigger and more diverse pool of technological “know how”. It will cost you nothing, besides customizing/integrating development cost while implementing it into your own operations infrastructure. Open source may give you tips on improvement to your strategies, lead to new ideas or you can simply adopt a lot of it without any changes. Unlike most of the proprietary systems, open source software will not bind you to a certain hardware manufacturers (that are used by your software vendors) and you would be free to chose what is best for you (and your pocket).

One can argue that its all good, but how about support, reliability and more importantly timeliness of those two. At least having a software vendor there is someone who can add a newly desired feature (that is very important) and at least there is some one to call when the system goes down and this someone is obliged to fix it for you in a matter of days.  The answer to that is - if the open software would become popular in the hedge fund business there would be tons and tons of the individual freelance developers as well as dedicated software companies who would be specializing in customization and improvement of it. I believe you would be able to get and so much desired new features and support and you also will be able to shop for these services. Eventually you as a consumer will win.

If open source software has brought so much positive to consumers in other software industries (think Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse) why it can not do well in hedge fund software field???

Check out www.boost.org

A few specifics of interest include Regular Expressions, a soon to be released Time Series, date/time operations, some geometry constructs, state machine tools, and, well, the list goes on.

* Angelo Gordon, John Angelo and Michael Gordon
* AQR Capital Management, LLC, Clifford Asness
* Appaloosa Management, David Tepper and Jack Walton
* Atticus Capital, Timothy Barakett, David Slagger
* Avenue Capital, Marc Lasry, Sonia Gardner
* Bessent Capital, Scott Bessent
* The Blackstone Group | Kailix Advisors, J Tomlinson, Bruce Amlicke, Halbert Lindquist
* Blue Ridge Capital, John Griffin
* Blue Mountain Capital Managment, LP Andrew Feldstein, Stephen Siderow, Gery Sampere
* BP Capital Management, T Boone Pickens
* Bridgewater, Ray Dalio
* Bull Dog Investors, Philip Goldstein
* Cantillon, William Von Mueffling
* Blue Wave (Caryle Group), Ralph Reynolds, Rick Goldsmith
* Caxton Associates, Bruce Kovner
* Centaurus Energy, John Arnold
* Cerberus Capital Management LP, Steve Feinberg
* Citadel Investment Group LLC, Ken Griffin
* Citigroup/Tribeca, Oliver Dobbs, Albert Ee, Gay Huey Evans, Steve Geovanis, Rick Harrell, Sofia Katzap
* Clarium Capital Management, Peter Thiel
* Convexity, Jack Meyer
* DE Shaw, David Shaw
* Dillon Read (UBS), John Costas, William Brown, John Larum, Joe Scoby
* Elliot Associates, Paul Singer
* ESL Investments, Edward Lampert
* Eton Park, Eric Mindich
* Farallon Capital Management Partners LP, Thomas Steyer
* Fortis Investments, Wes Edens
* FrontPoint, Gil Caffray
* Greenlight Capital, David Einhorn
* Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Eric Schwartz, Peter Kraus
* Highfields Capital, Jonathon Jacobson, Richard Grubman
* Icahn Partners, Carl Icahn
* JP Morgan/Highbridge Capital Management LLC, Glen Dubin
* JWM Partners, John Meriweather
* Kingdon Capital, Mark Kingdon
* Kynikos, James Chanos
* Lone Pine Capital, Stephen Mendell JR.
* Magnetar, Alec Litowitz
* Maverick Capital Management, Lee Ainsile
* Millennium Partners, Israel Englander
* Moore Capital, Louis Bacon
* Och Ziff Capital Management Group, Dan Och
* Omega Advisors, Leon Cooperman
* Ospraie Management, Dwight Anderson
* Paulson & Co., John Paulson
* Pequot Capital Management, Arthur Samberg
* Perry Capital, Richard Perry
* PSAM, Peter Schoenfeld
* Renaissance Technologies, James Simmons
* SAC Capital, Steven Cohen
* Silver Point Capital, Edward Mule, Robert o’shea
* Third Point Partners, Daniel Loeb
* Touradji Capital, Paul Touradji
* TPG-Axon, Dinakar Singh
* Trafelet & Co, Remy Trafelet, LC Kvaal
* Tudor, Paul Tudor Jones
* Soros Fund Management LLC, George Soros
* York Capital, James Dinan
* Barclays Global Investors, Stan Beckers, Ken Kroner
* BlueBay Asset Management, Hugh Willis, Mark Poole
* BlueCrest Capital, Michael Platt, William Reeves
* Boussard & Gavaudan, Emmanuel Boussard, Emmanuel Gavaudan
* Brevan Howard, Alan Howard
* Brummer & Partners, Patrik Brummer
* Cambridge Place Investment Management, Martin Finegold, Bob Kramer
* Centaurus Capital, Bernard Opetit, Randy Freeman
* Cheyne Capital, Jonathon Lourie, Stuart Fiertz
* CQS, Michael Hintze
* Egerton Capital, John Armitage
* Ferox Capital, Jeremy Hermann
* Fulcrum Asset Management, Gavyn Davies
* Gartmore, Roger Guy
* GLG Partners, Noam Gottesman, Pierre Lagrange, Emmanuel Roman
* Hermitage Capital Management, William Browder
* KBC Alternative Investment Management, Carlo Georg
* Lansdowne Partners, Paul Ruddock, Steven Heinz, Peter Davies, Stuart Roden
* London Diversified Fund Management, David Gorton
* Man Group / AHL, Tim Wong
* Marshall Wallace, Ian Wace, Paul Marshall
* Jabre Capital Partners, Philippe Jabre
* Polygon Investments, Reade Griffith, Alexander Jackson, Paddy Dear
* RAB Capital, Philip Richards
* Red Kite, Michael Farmer, David Lilley, Oskar Lenowski
* Sloan Robinson, Hugh Sloane, George Robinson, Richard Chenevix-Trench
* Children’s Investment Fund Management TCI, Chris Hohn
* Thames River Capital, Charlier Porter
* Tocasfund, Martin Hughes
* Vega Asset Management, Ravinder Mehra
* ADM Capital, Robert Appleby
* Basis Capital, Steve Howell, Stuart Fowler
* Artradis Fund Management, Richard Magides, Stephen Diggle
* LIM Advisors, George Long
* Platinum Asset Management, Kerr Neilson
* Sparx Group, Shuhei Abe
* Tantallon Capital, Nick Harbinson
* Winnington Capital, Kenneth Hung

Another list I compiled very quickly. This time its about hedge fund administrators. Since the topic of this blog is hedge fund software and hedge fund administrators play a great role in the hedge fund software industry therefore deserve special attention.

G&S Associates, LLC
http://www.gsfundservices.com/

Fulcrum Limited
http://www.fulcrumlimited.com

Woodfield Fund Administration, LLC
http://www.woodfieldllc.com/

Piedmont Fund Services, Inc.
http://www.pfsglobal.com/

ALPS Price Meadows
http://www.pricemeadows.com/

Gemini Fund Services, LLC
http://www.geminifund.com/

Dundee Leeds
http://www.dundeeleeds.com/

Variman LLC
http://variman.com/

TripsWare
http://www.tripsware.com/

Apex Fund Services (US) Inc.
http://www.apexfundservices.com/

BGT Fund Administration
http://bgtconsulting.com/

IBN Technologies
http://www.ibntech.com/

More about hedge fund administrators in the later posts.

Financial firm’s software developers hail from a broad range of backgrounds and experience levels, coming together to work as one highly motivated, dynamic technology team. They face a wide array of technical challenges, including those involving high-performance distributed systems and real-time applications. Firm is always looking for new talent to join this energetic team of high achievers, a group that includes PhDs from top universities, as well as other accomplished professionals.

Developers all have at minimum a bachelor’s degree in computer science and experience using several different programming languages including Java. Successful candidates will typically have strong analytical and organizational skills, exceptional programming skills, a true love of building quality software and a team spirit. Large-scale systems experience is highly desirable. Finance experience is not necessary.

I quickly compiled a list of software companies working on the software products used by hedge funds:

Cogency Software (CogencySoft.com) Fund of Hedge Funds Insight and Investor Insight - integrated CRM, portfolio management and multi-currency GL, investor, partnership accounting software focused on Funds of Funds .

TKS Solutions (PennyItWorks.com): Penny - accounting software with target market of small to mid sized funds.

Connotate ( Connotate.com): Agent Community is research software collecting the web, email, xml, third party data vendors and internal applications data and transforming it into an database, excel, email and phone alert format with an user-friendly interface used in financial research. Intelligent agent software for data mining, monitoring, and extraction from web, desktop and enterprise sources. Established - 2000.

FundCount LLC (FundCount.com): FC Office and FC Web - desktop and web based accounting software for small and mid sized hedge funds, fund of funds, private equity funds and family offices. Partnership and GL accounting + integrated tax module. Established - 2003.

Isis Financial Systems (isisfs.com): IMS (Investment Management System) is a multi-currency accounting and portfolio management software. Includes integrated risk analytics module. Accounting module includes cash flow projection feature based on the “what if” analysis. Established - 2001.

Advanced Financial Applications (afapp.com): Impact PRO is a trade/order processing software. Established - 2004.

Advent Software (advent.com). Established 1997. Developed several software products: Geneva - portfolio accounting and reporting system; Advent Tamale RMS - research management software;  Advent Partner for investor accounting - partnership economic and U.S. tax accounting and reporting for onshore funds, investor management, reporting, and full investor accounting for both onshore and offshore funds.

AlternativeSoft (AlternativeSoft.com) - portfolio management software. Consists of three modules: Fund Selection module, Portfolio Construction module, Hedge Fund Replication module. Established - 2000.

Archway Technology Partners (ArchwayTechnology.net) ATWeb - web deployed accounting software. - G/L, investor relations, portfolio accounting, fund accounting, partnership accounting. Established - 2003.

Blue Systems (bluesystems.info) Blue Mobile - offers financial information for decision making on the mobile handsets (claim to offer software for more handsets that any competitor). Have multiple offices around the world. Established - 2002.

Charles River Systems (crd.com) - large software development company with multiple products and offices around the world.  Products include investment management system, portfolio management system, strategy analysis, trade management system,  investment compliance (real-time pre-trade, post-execution, and end-of-day compliance monitoring). Provide a managed private financial network providing with real-time FIX-based electronic connectivity to the global institutional investment community.

Code Red (coderedinc.com) - investment management and research software. Established - 2005. Products offer research management system (centralizes and analyzes shared drives, Microsoft Outlook folders and third party systems folders), research/investment management syste, research management system - integrates external data, configures custom fields and turn RedAlerts database into via XML Web Services an integration hub that facilitates the investment process.

Vitech Systems Group, Inc (VitechInc.com) - the software is not focused directly on the hedge funds or fohfs, but rather state pension funds, state health funds, city funds, county funds. Though their are claiming to be able to support administration of the hedge funds. Features include: CRM, reporting, payroll reporting, contributions processing, service credit purchases, refunds, buy-backs, pension calculations, eligibility calculations, health claims adjudication, benefits disbursements, participant communications.

Karl Thompson and Associates (KarlThompson.com) - consulting and software development services to hedge funds. Developed several hedge funds solutions. Products features: portfolio reconciliation, position reconciliation, data transfers (integrated with Advent’s Axys product).

Netgate Solutions, Inc (NetageSolutions.com) - have several CRM product lines (all of them are Outlook integrated) - InvestorDynamo, DealDynamo, PropertyDynamo, FundDynamo, InvestorDynamo Online Reporting.

Fi-Tek, LLC (fi-tek.com) - hedge fund accounting software (partnership allocation system) for hedge fund administrators, fund managers, and accounting firms. Offer web based report distribution. Established - 1999.

Delte Hedge Systems (deltahedgesystems.com) - provides hedge fund custom software development services. Also have their own software products - OmniHedge Equity (equities and options reporting) and OmniHedge Fixed Income / Credit (bonds, FX and Futures reporting).

21st Century Company (21stcenturycompany.com) - offer a diverse line of products for different industries. Hedge funds software is one of their products - is limited to the partners income allocation and fees calculation.

Portfolio Science, Inc (portfolioscience.com) - offer hedge fund risk management software  (RiskAPI). Established - 2000.

Vantage Software (vantage-software.com) - offer five software products: Vantage Insight, Vantage Deal Manager, Vantage Performance, Vantage Funds-Of-Funds, Vantage Investor.

Imagineer Technology Group, Inc (itgny.com) - offer software products for hedge funds, funds of funds and family offices. Software features: CRM, reporting, custom website development.

Zephyr Associates, Inc (styleadvisor.com) - offers several software products: AllocationADVISOR - asset allocation and financial planning software; StyleADVISER - investment managers, mutual funds, financial markets and investment portfolios analysis; ZephyrONDEMAND - web-based, distributed reporting tool designed to work in complement with StyleADVISOR.

FiHedge (fihedge.net) - webbased C#/ASP.net solutions: hedge fund administration, reporting, accounting.

FundSolve Ltd (fundsolve.co.uk) - hedge fund portfolio management software. Product - Nemos.

Trading Patterns (tradingpatterns.com)  - hedge fund trading research software. Established - 2000.

Vhayu (vhayu.com) - enterprise data retrieval and analytisc provider.

My Compliance Office (mycomplianceoffice.com) - hedge fund compliance software (automates and centralizes compliance procedures). SEC and FINRA compliance.

NobleTrading (nobletrading.com) - hedge fund web trading platforms.

Capital IQ (capitaliq.com) - hedge fund trading research software (company’s fundamental analysis, trade analysis, etc).

Wall Street Systems (wallstreetsystems.com) - developed back office, trading, treasure software solutions focused mostly on banks but also may be used by the alternative investment funds.

AIM-TO (aim-to.com) - hedge fund risk management data warehousing, risk management software.

Terra Nova Financial, LLC (tnfg.com) - hedge fund trading platforms for a variety of the markets. Established - 1997.

Alpha Theory (alphatheory.com) - hedge fund fundamental analysis, research and risk management software.

Comada (comada.com) - hedge fund portfolio and liquidity management software.

The Next Round (thenextround.com) - hedge fund and fund of funds management software.

Matrix Aims (matrixaims.com) - fund of funds, hedge fund management software. Offers several modules: Analyst, Portfolio Manager, Operations, Accounting, Marketing.

Global Fund Solutions (globalfundsolutions.com) - fund administration software - 100% web based solution.

NWT Financial Group (nwtfinancialgroup.com) - hedge fund trading software, software integration, data access services.

Hedge Connection (hedgeconnection.com) - web-based, marketing tool that facilitates relationship building and allows direct interaction and exchange of information between hedge funds and opt-in, qualified investors.

ProTrak (protrak.com) - CRM for asset-manager, hedge funds, fund of hedge funds, equity managers.

Tao Analytics (taoanalytics.com) - hedge fund investment research, risk analytics software.

Clarifi (clarifi.com) - hedge fund investment research software.

Imagine Software (derivatives.com) - hedge fund  portfolio and risk management systems.

Markov Processes (markovprocesses.com) - investment analysis, risk management hedge fund software.

Tradar (tradar.com) - hedge fund portfolio management software.

SS&C Technologies, Inc (ssctech.com) - provides the global financial services industry with a broad range of highly specialized software, software enabled-services and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for operational excellence.

UnRisk (UnRisk.com) UnRisk provides a family of products for financial institutions; UnRisk-Q for quant development, UnRisk PRICING ENGINE for derivatives analytics, UnRisk FACTORY for risk analytics.

OptiRisk Systems (OptiRisk-Systems.com) OptiRisk Systems offers products and services in the area of Optimisation, Risk Modelling, Portfolio Planning, Asset and Liability Management, Supply Chain Management, Strategic & Tactical Management, Scheduling of Transport Assets.

As a pretty much every business hedge funds are in need for a variety of the software products to support different aspects of their business. Multiple software products may be needed to support their back office operations as well as front office.

Any hedge fund would definitely need software products to support such operations as:

• Accounting
• Client Relationship Management
• Risk Analysis
• Trade Execution
• Portfolio Management
• Research
• Utility software that help them to integrate software products from different software vendors

A lot of times hedge fund manager decide to invest in integrated software products covering if not all, but the majority of their needs. As a rule back office software products do not have any front office modules.

If in case of the accounting or CRM software products where one product will fully satisfy manager’s needs, a lot of times more than one software vendor is needed for a front office operations. Pretty much any manager has several financial data providers (Bloomberg, etc).

Bigger Hedge Funds invest in the proprietory software systems.