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15 Dec 2008

Hong Kong Hedge Fund Triples Investor Relation Technology

Hong Kong-based hedge fund manager PMA has chosen to more than triple the number of users of PerTrac CMS in the company's Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London, and Dubai offices.

PerTrac CMS is an alternative investment workflow management solution used for investor relations, capital raising and investment management workflows.

"PMA's marketing reach has expanded significantly over the last 12 months and we now has marketing teams based in our Dubai and London offices as well as representations in New York," noted PMA Chief Technology Officer Shane McPherson.

PMA was established in July 2002 to provide investment advisory and investment with assets over $2 billion, PMA currently has over 70 professionals employed in Hong Kong, Sydney, London and Dubai, and became a member of the SPARX group in April 200, the largest publicly listed asset manager in Asia.

Salus Alpha Hedge Funds Not Exposed To Madoff Strategy

Vienna based hedge fund manager Salus Alpha Group Services GmbH said that any exposure to Madoff funds were systematically prevented by the proprietary investment approach of their funds at all times.

"I am not shocked that Madoff did blow up but I am shocked that so many obviously unqualified naive fund of hedge fund managers who are obviously doing no due diligence nor do they understand hedge fund strategies do manage so much amounts of money and wonder why this happened to them" said Oliver Prock, CIO of Salus Alpha.

"We never invested into US and UK hedge funds which work under the rules of 'don’t ask, don’t tell'," the hedge fund manager said, "We always scrutinized this model by one simple question to the biggest hedge fund manager?. A 'No' always meant that there are problems behind such as in the Madoff situation."

The investment approach of Salus Alpha consists of state of the art due diligence and executing investments as managed accounts only, which the fund manager says has prevented and will prevent the company at from investing into Illusion Alpha.

"We did not get any inquiry form existing investors since they know that all funds Salus Alpha manages are fully regulated under UCITS III and do invest in liquid alpha strategies through managed accounts only and are therefore protected at all times," Salus Alpha concluded.

Dow Jones Hedge Fund Strategy Benchmark Review

West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) - In the monthly report from Dow Jones Indexes on the performance of Hedge Fund Strategy Benchmarks, only one of four strategies, merger arbitrage, posted net-of-fee gains in November.

After hedge funds experienced two of the most volatile months in market history, merger arbitrage emerged with a small positive net-of-fee gain in November, returning 0.15%. The small gain held YTD performance for merger arbitrage at approximately the same level as last month, down about -9%.

Convertible arbitrage was hit the hardest with a loss of -4.80%, followed by event driven and distressed securities, which were down -6.35% and -7.47%, respectively, for November.

The equity market neutral and equity long/short benchmarks were suspended at the start of the month as a result of the temporary risk mitigation measures taken by the investment manager of the managed account platform that supports the Dow Jones Hedge Fund Strategy Benchmarks. It has not been determined when calculation of these benchmarks will resume.

On a float-adjusted basis, the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000, the only broad measure of the domestic equity market, lost -8% (-8.15% on a full-cap basis) in November decreasing its YTD return to -38.30% (-38.37% on a full-cap basis).

The fixed income asset class, as measured by the Dow Jones Corporate Bond Index was up 4.88% this month and its cumulative return is down -5.99% for the year. Finally, the Dow Jones Wilshire Global Index, the broadest measure of global equity market, lost -6.73% for the month decreasing its YTD return to -44.68% for 2008.

November 2008 figures for the Dow Jones Hedge Fund Strategy Benchmarks are based on daily estimates net of fees.