Why do Hedge Funds need a data warehouse

Data Extraction, Transformation and Loading

Data Agent ETL capabilities are specifically designed to facilitate the movement and transformation of large disparate data sets. The Data Agent ETL process has three major functions:

• Extraction of data from one or more internal and/or external data sources
• Transformation of data along predefined business rules for data cleansing, reformatting, standardization, and aggregation
• Loading of data into the Data Mart

The Data Agent team has real-world data management capabilities, having worked with some of the largest global investment managers on a variety of data integration projects. Our “out of the box” data integration loaders include but are not limited to the following data sets:

• Market data (Bloomberg, Reuters, Compustat, S&P, MSCI, Barclays)
• Trade order management systems (Charles River, Latent Zero)
• Accounting system data (Geneva, STAR, Axys, AFS)
• U.S. government data (census data, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.)
• Custodian data (State Street, BoNY, Northern Trust, BofA)
• Analytical data (Factset, Barclays, Intex, Markit Partners)
• Hedge fund data providers (Eurekahedge, Hedge Fund Research, LipperTASS)

Intelligent Data Management

Data Mart is a fully managed data solution and utility for reference and market data, including asset descriptive data, pricing, corporate actions, terms and conditions, counterparty/ legal entities, and indices, in a recursive data structure.

• Counterparty exposure is provided across all securities (stocks, bonds, loans, SIV’s, etc.) to a specific issuer, servicer, or insurer and to all its subsidiaries, etc
• The Data Agent security master includes an extensive set of entities to keep individual legs of an instrument or to aggregate them to more complex instruments such as contracts, pools, strategies, and other security aggregation requirements.

Data Mart handles complex financial business rules such as position adjustments, contracts, hedge strategies, multiple cost basis, and multiple accounting basis, as well as complex derivative products. Data Mart’s built-in meta and business rules make it easy to add new data entities and attributes and to adapt to new security instruments without changing current reports.

Data Agent’s recursive data structure efficiently manages large complex hierarchal sets of financial data. Data Mart can handle standard investment instruments plus other complex derivatives such as private equities, loans, repos, buy-backs, swaps, interbased swaps, warrants, embedded options, CDS’s, CDO’s, CDO-squares, private placements, and other OTC instruments.

Data Mart’s multi-tiered decision-support model blends data warehousing capabilities with the functionality of Data Mart, allowing organizations to achieve the long-term benefits promised by data warehousing without compromising the immediate business requirements of data-hungry knowledge workers. This hybrid approach can lower operating costs associated with legacy systems used for decision support.

Comprehensive Data Analytics and Visualizations

Data Analytics is a multidimensional data structure built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform. Data Analytics provides private wealth managers with a comprehensive and dynamic solution for data management and analysis, ranging from ad hoc querying to sophisticated analytic modeling. Intuitive data navigation, powerful calculations, and advanced visualizations are core components that provide rapid insight, allowing you to make critical decisions in a fraction of the time it takes you today.

Built-in Analytics

Data Analytics is tailored to an investment manager’s workflow and provides a highly interactive, configurable solution with powerful analytical capabilities in an easy-to-use user interface, enabling researchers to deconstruct a portfolio’s sources of return. You can choose country, currency, or economic/industry sectors; fundamental factors such as asset size, growth, and P/E; or custom schemes to measure performance drivers.

Data Analytics delivers multi-currency performance attribution, sophisticated portfolio profiling, and exposure and risk analysis, allowing you to maintain alignment with portfolio investment objectives.

Investment managers can utilize nested attribution analysis, multi-period linking, and single or multi-currency analysis to analyze the structure and characteristics of any portfolio. You can easily see how security selection within each portfolio impacts your overall fund. The exposure/risks component allows for analysis and attribution of risk, including market and nonmarket, risk attributable to common factors and industry exposures, and risk attributable to individual holdings.

The advanced visualization capabilities of Data Analytics allow for ease of navigation between indices and portfolios, allowing you to quickly compare across benchmarks or by a portfolio’s characteristics over time. Specifically, you can:

• Optimize portfolios: Construct portfolios that are centrally managed, with common definitions for business rules, calculations, and predefined templates.
• Analyze abnormal returns: Analyze returns using Data Analytics' quadrant analysis to understand events leading to variation between expected and actual returns.
• Select securities: Select securities using optimal parameters uncovered with the Data Analytics model.
• Identify risks: Analyze present risks and identify unknown risks to limit your portfolio exposure to market fluctuations. Monitor your current portfolios to determine if their level of exposure falls within targeted limits.

Custom Analytics

Data Analytics integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Business Intelligence products, including Microsoft Office to provide user-directed analytics. Your organization’s existing financial models can easily be uploaded and integrated into Data Analytics to maintain your existing business logic.

Advanced Data Visualization

Data Analytics provides a robust set of data visualization capabilities that assist you in quickly performing complex recursive and time-series analysis on large, disparate sets of data. The following charts provide a few examples of the visualization capabilities provided in HF-Suite.

• Decomposition Tree: Focus through layers of information and analyze root cause. Initiate a tree from any point on a data grid or business chart.
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• Charting and Grid Analysis: An interactive grid allows drill-down through multiple dimensions.
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• Performance Map: Use heat map technology to see the relevance of large quantities of data. Compare two measures at once based on parameters you define.
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Internal and External Reporting Capabilities

Data Agent’s Data Reports package is an enterprise reporting framework designed to simplify the process of report creation, production, printing, and delivery for a variety of operational, management, and compliance reporting requirements.

Compliance Reporting

Data Mart’s data aggregation capabilities can provide real-time access to all trading activities across trading platforms and custodian platforms, enabling you to understand your security ownership positions in real time. Data Agent’s compliance reporting feature alerts management to the need for fillings and can provide the appropriate filing documentation for each security.

Custom Reports

Data Reports is built on Microsoft’s SQL server reporting service and provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize your reporting functionality.

Data Reports takes advantage of report description language (RDL), an industry-standard report format descriptor. RDL’s XML-based report description format makes it easy to create and enhance existing reports using a variety of software tools and eliminates dependency on the proprietary technology of a single vendor. The RDL standard also integrates well into an enterprise system based on service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Data Reports includes a comprehensive set of prebuilt reports for hedge fund managers across the following report categories: