Hedge Fund News New York: In December 2000, years before any of the hedge fund database services decided to dip their toes into the arena of ranking systems, Joseph Omansky saw the opportunity to take informational hedge fund database listings to the next step. Thus was born the SkyRank system which provides a quantitative evaluation service to the growing number of hedge fund investors. Recent news has shown the cottage industry of hedge fund databases scrambling to catch up and as Opalesque learned that the SkyRank system's pending patent is slated for approval we reached out to Omansky to learn about his hedge fund analysis, the changes he has seen in industry information sharing over the past eight years and a new investment product SkyRank is seeking to launch. He is evaluating platforms and in discussions with seeders. The product is to be an overlay on top of a managed account platform. Backtesting has demonstrated the product to yield approximately 15% annualized returns at volatility levels around 5%.
SkyRank's evaluation systems
Omansky's immersion into the world of hedge funds began when as an equity options market maker for Lakota Trading he was approached by hedge fund firm Tradelink LLC to run a strategy based on an equity options volatility model he developed.
While managing this strategy Omansky saw opportunity in the very private industry as limited amounts of information were available even to those investors who qualified to place their assets in them. "The people that were investing in hedge funds had common themes which they looked to quantify before investing. These included low correlation to public markets, track records, and breadth of investors. I saw a value in creating a quantitative methodology to encompass all of these inputs, and the additional information which would become available as the industry grew," said Omansky. In the time since he first launched this vision SkyRank has worked through numerous years of research and development and today rates over 8000 hedge funds, fund of funds and CTAs using the patent pending system that went live in 2004.
The launch of SkyRank required a certain amount of foresight to the possible growth of the industry. At the time of the service launch, many people felt there was no opportunity and little need to rank hedge funds. The larger databases stayed away from the concept for fear that managers only beginning to share their performance information would not divulge returns that would open their performance to ranking. Additionally, the service was deemed unnecessary because funds of funds and institutional investors and the large family offices investing in hedge funds followed their own proprietary systems of fund evaluation. However, in an industry which has leapt to approximately 8,000 funds and $3 tln in assets, initial filters have become a necessity for these investors. In fact, a recent Opalesque series on seed funding found those fund of funds managers interviewed looked to such services as one of the first points of evaluation filtering before taking funds through their own proprietary reporting.
The database information
Taking the concept of a hedge fund database inclusive of contact information and basic administration information such as strategy descriptions, contact infor......................
Source:
http://www.opalesque.com/AMB2008/46501SkyRank_hedge_fund_rating_system_launches.html
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