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Copenhagen Fintech Accelerator invests in Singapore-based platform fund manager
Copenhagen Fintech Accelerator invests in Singapore-based platform fund manager

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.

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Webinar – January 2019
Webinar – January 2019

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.

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Can crowdsourcing revitalize Asia’s hedge fund industry?
Can crowdsourcing revitalize Asia’s hedge fund industry?

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.

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The Incredible Value of Finance
The Incredible Value of Finance

A little over twenty years ago I moved from chemical engineering to finance. Interestingly, I still consider myself an engineer. I always figure I can solve any problem, which in the case of chemical engineers is through processes.I was attracted to finance because it is a technically demanding and very interesting field. Unfortunately, it is also opaque and usually poorly understood. This is a shame because it is very important for everyone in this modern world for finance to operate effectively.

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Noviscient Featured on Bloomberg.com
Noviscient Featured on Bloomberg.com

Noviscient has been featured on Bloomberg with an article on new Asian fund startups that are eschewing the 2/20 fee model. We believe that moving to a 0% management fee structure and providing downside offers better alignment for investors by creating incentives to focus on performance and exercising sound risk management practices.

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The Challenge for Asset Management
The Challenge for Asset Management

In the last post, we were left with the suspicion that the asset management industry has some work in front of it to be “ready, willing and able” to create value for its investors.Are we ready to radically change our processes and infrastructure and mindsets?Are we willing to completely restructure our fees and operate with full transparency to be truly aligned with our investors?With our existing people, technology and capabilities, are we able to offer real risk-adjusted performance while cutting costs by up to 90% and delivering real-time engagement for our investors?

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A Modern Investment Manager
A Modern Investment Manager

We are in one of the most interesting times in investment management. There will be more opportunities to build great businesses than ever before, but they will be different from the past. At Noviscient we are working very hard to re-imagine how investment management can and should work. We are in the process of building one of these great businesses.From our point of view, the current business model for active management and hedge funds is not working. Fees are high, performance is poor and alignment is low. This is an opportunity but it needs a new approach.

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The hedge fund industry is broken
The hedge fund industry is broken

The traditional hedge fund model is no longer working. Performance is poor. Costs are high. Alignment is low. It needs to change. The three forces driving this need for change are:Increasing costs as regulators and investors demand higher operational standardsPressure on fees as investors are become more sophisticated and expect more for lessGreater competition making the markets more efficient and fragmenting available alph.

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Ready, willing and able?
Ready, willing and able?

In my last post, I discussed the importance of the financial industry for everyone from individual investors to nation-states. It plays a critical role in allocating risk and capital which enables economic growth. I suggested that the mechanism for effective allocation is the fair pricing of securities and that active fund managers are the main agents to make this work. Active managers create value by helping to keep prices fair thereby supporting efficient allocation of risk and capital.

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Noviscient update on Bloomberg
Noviscient update on Bloomberg

By Klaus Wille(Bloomberg) — Scott Treloar, a former Deutsche Bank AG quant specialist, has started his own hedge fund that allocates money to traders around the world.Noviscient Pte aims to have $40 million of assets by the end of this year and $250 million by December 2019, Treloar said in an interview. He’s targeting returns of 10 percent to 15 percent a year — more than double the average hedge fund return of the past 10 years of 4.6 percent, according to data provider Eurekahedge Pte. The fund will charge a 36 percent performance fee, but won’t levy management charges.Rather than employ portfolio managers in his Singapore office, Treloar allocates funds to strategies provided by traders based around the world. A commodity futures trader with a doctorate in machine learning is based in Australia, while another is working from the U.S. and focuses on systematic volatility trading of ETFs.

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