Yesterday AFX Capital announced that the company is going to rebrand as AFX Group. Shortly thereafter we are focusing on the company’s asset management unit and the hedge fund incubator Quantic Lab.
The Quantic lab is looking for traders through the company’s STP brokerage unit where it can observe the trading behavior of its clients. The firm commits small amounts of capital with them as a second stage before reaching out to the network once a successful enough track record is established.
With a team of in-house portfolio managers that are running Quantic’s strategies the company has successfully established itself in the market, but via the Quantic Lab it is also aiming to find new talent that has developed different strategies from the firm’s own.
Commenting to Finance Magnates about the Quantic Lab, the Global Head of Sales and Liquidity Management at Quantic Francois Nembrini said: “In essence we are raising more assets as our distribution network is growing and would like to diversify our strategy portfolio to capture more of our investors assets.”
“Our typical investor has net worth in the 1 to $10 million range and typically puts 10 per cent of his assets in our strategies. The more strategies we have the more chances we have to increase this percentage,” he elaborated.
Incubator Quantic Lab Open to All Types of Strategies
Unlike many market players, Quantic is not limiting the scope of traders that it is looking for through its incubator lab. The company is running strategies that have an automated signal generation mechanism but the execution has a discretionary element to better cater to liquidity conditions. The Lab program is however open to all sort of strategies discretionary or automated.
As is the case with virtually all companies in the industry, Quantic is tailoring its products to the desires of the investment community. As a responsible asset manager, the company is looking for low leverage strategies.
"We run our strategies at fairly low leverage. Clients we have do not want to have much Volatility on their investments. We find it very hard to raise significant assets on strategies with drawdowns above 10 per cent so typically strategies we sell have fairly conservative leverage levels. This does not mean we do not want to consider traders with higher drawdowns in the Lab, we simply look at the relationship between drawdowns and results to judge the strategy quality,” Nembrini explained.
Quantic Prime of Prime Offering Incoming
AFX Group’s Quantic asset management unit is also preparing to leverage the expertise of the company in trading and is preparing to unveil to the market the company’s prime of prime offering later this year. With the firm boasting a solid balance sheet and the necessary regulatory permits, the company is aiming to expand its financial services on multiple levels.
By launching QUANTIC Prime, the firm is entering the space of prime of prime offerings by using the company's interbank technology to connect clients to 90% of the existing FX platforms with real time control of their liquidity.
"QUANTIC prime leverages the AFX Group's balance sheet, mixing asset management under QUANTIC and a brokerage under an STP (Straight Through Processing) model to provide institutional clearing and execution services for the clients of the company,” commented the Global Head of Sales and Liquidity Management at Quantic, Francois Nembrini.
Quantic has already secured the services of French global investment bank Societe Generale, as a multi-product prime broker. The firm is preparing to deliver the solution to market in the coming months.
