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There were many surprises for us at the start of 2020. The halt to life as we knew it, with contrary and questionable statistics, bringing the light the need for clear, reliable data. The impact to many of our portfolio companies, much of which is still unfolding, highlighting how much the manner in which a firm operates may not be obvious to investors[1]. One clear surprise for the investment community was how several investment strategies that had promised diversification or pure alpha returns transpired to correlate highly to the market.

Hedge funds managers are known to be secretive and protective of their trading strategies, the “secret sauce” that generates their returns. Very little on how they trade or what they trade is revealed to the public or even their investors. While funds managing over $100 million AUM are required to file quarterly reports to disclose their positions, these reports are seriously flawed on their completeness and timeliness.

Even before Burton Malkiel popularised the term in 1973, investors had begun taking random walks and applying other theories supporting diversification of their portfolios. Yet today, the investment community, in particular the decision-making community, might be observed to be concentrating.

The asset management industry is a data industry, handling information rather than physical goods. It is an industry that is managing $100 trillion in assets. It is an industry that impacts the retirement outcomes and future happiness for every single one of us.

Investors have three ways to generate returns in tradable markets. Invest in deposits or government bonds to earn a risk-free rate of return (time value of money); Take on various market and factor risks to earn the respective risk premia (betas); Find inefficiencies and dislocations in markets and capture this excess returns (alpha).

Singapore fintech firm Noviscient is looking to change the way investors find alpha via a technology driven platform that helps select and allocate to quality alpha funds.Scott Treloar, founder at Noviscient in Singapore, said the technology was similar to how Amazon provided a matching service for customers and suppliers. Noviscient’s platform, however, allowed the firm to tailor custom solutions for investors from trade data collected from participating funds, making it more than just a matching service.

A few years ago, as the chief risk officer at an Asian alternative investments firm, Scott Treloar found himself in an unexpected situation.The company, which had been managing over US$5 billion, was trying to raise capital for hedge funds. Treloar thought it would be a breeze.Much to his surprise, no one was interested – and they failed to raise any money.Investors said they weren’t keen on hedge funds, as those had been performing poorly for the past decade. In 2019, fund managers underperformed in the S&P 500 Index – a commonly used benchmark – for the ninth consecutive year.

Singapore-based AI open-platform fund manager Noviscient has been selected as one of eight winners and the first Asian startup to join the Copenhagen Fintech Accelerator.The Singaporean-Danish FinTech tie continues to pave the way for strong startup collaboration – the latest living proof is Noviscient, pointed out the investment management firm in a press release.

We’ve organized our first webinar in January 2019. During this webinar, our founder Scott Treloar discusses the benefits of working with as an Alpha Partner, how to get started and how you can connect to us. In case any of you have questions about this, please email us at alpha@noviscient.com.

Noviscient, a Singapore-based alternative investment shop, is crowdsourcing independent systematic traders and packaging them into a hedge fund.The aim is to use APIs and a computerized risk model to create a vehicle that strips out almost all of the costs associated with hedge funds, while providing a business opportunity for quants with clever ideas.“I’m not paying portfolio managers,” said Scott Treloar, founder. “They only get paid if they perform.”He says Noviscient is not a matching service: it’s a “platform fund”. He’s not putting fund managers together with institutional investors. “The value is in selecting who has got alpha,” he told DigFin. “We allocate to managers doing well and weed out those doing poorly. ”There is plenty of talent out there, people coming out of investment banks or other funds who want to apply their quant expertise to portfolios, but the high capital requirements to start a hedge fund tend to strangle most of these efforts.