UCITS 3 Hedge Funds Index Launch

HedgeCo News - Geneva based hedge fund advisory company, NARA Capital, announced plans to release its UCITS Alternative Index® to the public. A series of indices aims to track the performance UCITS hedge funds and funds of funds.

”NARA has been tracking the emergence of UCITS hedge funds for more than two years and has constructed and developed what is probably the most comprehensive database of that universe." Louis Zanolin, Partner at NARA Capital said, "The trend for more regulated and liquid alternative strategies will increase the demand for UCITS alternative funds over the coming year, so will the need for independent comparative tools. We have therefore decided to publicly release the index performance.”

The UCITS Alternative Index® series are equally weighted. The performance for any particular month will accessible on the UCITS Alternative Index® website www.ucits-alternative.com generally on the 5th business day of the following month. The inception date of the index is 1st January 2008.

As of February 2009 the UCITS Alternative Index® was tracking close to 400 UCITS hedge funds and funds of hedge funds totaling more than 63 billion EUR assets under management. Only funds pursuing hedge fund like strategies are taken into account for the index calculation. Absolute return funds with no shorting capabilities as well as 130/30 and passive hedge funds index UCITS funds are excluded from the
index.

In 2009, the UCITS Alternative Index® Global returned +9.27% while the UCITS Alternative Index® Fund of Funds returned + 1.64%.

With +34.68%, the UCITS Alternative Index® Emerging Markets was the best performing strategy in 2009.

It was followed by the UCITS Alternative Index® Fixed Income which returned +11.83%. The least performing index in 2009 was the UCITS Alternative Index® Equity Market Neutral with a -0.57%.

At the end of January 2010, Macro hedge funds represented the largest assets under management with 27.3 billion EUR ($ 36.9 billion). It was followed by Fixed Income and Long/Short Equity Funds with respectively 26.7 and 20.7 billion EUR ($36.1 and $28 billion). In term of jurisdiction, 48% of the funds were based in Luxemburg, 20% in Ireland 17% and in France.