By Victor Anderson
An excerpt from the January issue of Hedge Fund & Investment Technology. For the full article, visit http://www.hfitechnology.com
Iris Financial Solutions has established a strong following among top-tier investment banks and large, traditional investment managers since its founding some 15 years ago. But the firm recently widened its focus with the launch of Iris Hedge Fund Manager, its first formal foray into the alternative asset management space. Iris launched Iris Hedge Fund Manager in Q4 2005. The product is a front- and middle-office application designed to support each stage of the alternative investment life cycle, including trade execution, portfolio and position management, trade management and processing, and risk management. Iris claims to have worked with a number of billion-dollar hedge funds prior to unveiling Iris Hedge Fund Manager, and the experience gleaned from the industry guided the firm in developing a platform that is "quick to deploy, robust, flexible, and most importantly, easy to use."
User comments:
Jeremy Evnine is founder of Evnine and Associates, a San Francisco, CA-based hedge fund specialising in statistical arbitrage and equity market-neutral strategies in the US, UK and Japan. The fund uses Iris Hedge Fund Manger to support and trade its multi-hundred million dollar pool of assets under management. "Iris Hedge Fund Manager is a complete solution," Evnine explains. "It gives us all the functionality we need on a day-to-day basis and gives us the ability to grow and change within our extremely fast-moving marketplace."
"Iris's technology strategy enables us to concentrate on what we do best -- generating returns," Evnine continues. "Even relatively large funds like our have to be lean and nimble -- we can't be held hostage by rigid, hard-coded applications that don't move as quickly as we need them to. The other critical aspect of the Iris Hedge Fund Manager is its ability to help us be innovators in our market -- to deliver better returns, we need to constantly develop new and innovative investment strategies. Hedge Fund Manager's flexibility and ability to evolve is a key factor in that innovation."
