Fund Administration

Start A Hedge Fund

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:44:50 +0000

Start A Hedge Fund

Concise Guide on How to Start a Hedge Fund

I have advised and worked with over 400 hedge fund startups of all different strategies and geographical locations and we have identified capital raising strategies, best practices, and the most common mistakes made by emerging hedge fund managers.

We have captured our consulting advice and over 100 hedge fund startup lessons within our e-book, “Start A Hedge Fund Now.”

Within This Book You Will Receive:

An open transcript of an interview with an established hedge fund manager who provides advice on what he learned while launching his hedge fund
A detailed break-down of the types of service proivders and business parnters you will need to work with within your hedge fund business
Direct capital raising consulting advice on how to raise capital for a new hedge fund business
The Top 10 Common $10,000 mistakes often made every day by new hedge funds and our advice on how to avoid these mistakes
A guide to writing your hedge fund business plan
Strategies on how to upgrade the pedigree, credentials, and education of your team
17 direct lessons from successful fast growing hedge fund businesses that you can use within your new hedge fund

This E-Book PDF Also Provides You With:

Guides to understanding, interviewing, and selecting prime brokers, incubation programs, administrators, third party marketers, formation attorneys, and compliance consultants
Dense and Concise 35 pages of pure hedge fund startup advice that won’t take you all year to read and put to use
Email marketing best practices to employ while speaking to potential investors
Why many hedge fund marketing tactics waste time and money and a breakdown on what these top 10 capital raising mistakes are so you may avoid them in your business
Section-by-Section instructions and tips for creating your PowerPoint pitch book that is expected or required to raise capital from every type of investor

To purchase this e-book which represents around $3,000 worth of hedge fund startup consulting advice for $17 please visit StartAHedgeFundNow.com

Testimonials:

Kenneth Nodes, President of HillStone Capital Managment, LLC “Thanks for letting me read your e-book. The information was both timely and useful. We are in the process of setting our new fund and where able to plainly see the areas that we needed to focus more attention on. This book is both straight forward and pertinent to anyone looking to setup a fund.”

Robert Donnelly, Managing Partner of JDS Global Partners, LLC “Start a Hedge Fund Now is an incredible value, well worth the money, and the time. I have spent hours upon hours reading material on starting a hedge fund. This book took me less than an hour to read, and got 10 times the value compared to other sources. Richard Wilson truly knows about the challenges and mistakes that are made starting a hedge fund, and has provided an incredibly valuable guide to being successful.”

Anmol Chattha, Trader, “This book should be required reading for everyone from the start up hedge fund manager to the experienced hedge fund veteran. The information is presented in a very condensed and detailed manner with multiple insider perspectives on the industry.”

Douglas MacLean, Armor Compliance, “Great insight into various facets of the hedge fund industry. Provides helpful guidance to start-up managers about how to operate and not operate their hedge funds.

Ron Jacob, Managing Partner of JDS Global Partners, LLC “this is a must read for any entrepreneur looking to get started in the world of hedge funds. The information you provided was invaluable and something most people only learn through mistakes. Thanks for steering us in the right direction!”

Note: Above are quotes from professionals who have read our e-book over the past few months. Please note that the first six professionals listed were sent a free copy of the e-book to review but were not compensated in any way or rewarded for providing us with positive feedback. All testimonials may be verified or certified by any part by emailing us at team@hedgefundstartupkit.com.

To buy this e-book for $17 please visit http://StartAHedgeFundNow.com

tags: Start A Hedge Fund, How to Start A Hedge Fund, Starting A Hedge Fund, Help Starting a Hedge Fund, Start A Hedge Fund Now, Start A Hedge Fund Book

Copywriting for Capital Raising

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:43:19 +0000

Copywriting for Capital Raising

This short video below explains why copywriting is so important and why ignoring this area can kill your progress towards raising more capital for your hedge fund. Below is a definition of copywriting for those of you new to the subject, and if you are reading this via rss or email you will need to click here to view the embedded video on our website.

Definition of Copywriting: The strategic use of the right words within sales letters, websites and presentations to influence others to take action.

Top 10 Fund Marketing Mistakes

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:02:41 +0000

Top 10 Fund Marketing Mistakes

Our team provides over 1,600 funds a year with capital raising advice, resources and products. Our team has also helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital as well. Through these two sources of experience we see many of the same fund marketing mistakes made over and over again.

If you can avoid these mistakes you will be more effective than 80% of your competitors in the marketplace.

Top 10 Fund Marketing Mistakes:

Mistake #1: You have a 3 month capital raising goal. This is un-realistic and the wrong mindset to go out of the gates with. You need to plan, build relationships, educate potential clients, and design high quality marketing strategies and materials for the long term. It takes time to raise lots of capital and usually the more valuable the investor, the longer the sales cycle. Don’t try to cram everything into a 1-3 month capital raise.

Mistake #2: Counting on simply building a track record and then hoping to outsource all marketing to a great third party marketing firm down the road. This puts all of your eggs into the third party marketing basket. Third party marketers have hundreds of potential clients approach them each year, it is risky to assume one will not only take you on as a client but actually raise a sustainable level of capital for you.

Mistake #3: Spending $8,000 on graphic design and website design but $0 on hiring someone who is an expert at sales letter construction, writing copy, and creating headlines and taglines for your positioning in the marketplace that will be effective. Many times I see fund managers that want to look very professional but there is no meat in what they are saying, or hook to draw in the reader.

Mistake #4: Not dedicating resources to capital raising is the most obvious mistake that I see in the industry. Many fund managers will act as the CIO, make 2-3 phone calls a week or sometimes per month and then wonder why they have not raised more capital. Performance does NOT market itself, pedigree does NOT swing all doors wide open. You need to have dedicated resources, an internal marketing resource working at least 20 hours/week, investor databases so you can spend your time calling on real prospects instead of always having to qualify them, and have a growing internal CRM or IRM system in place to track this investment in investor relationships.

Mistake #5: Speaking at conferences full of your closest competitors instead of your highest value potential investors.

Mistake #6: Under-estimating the value of a first name basis relationship with your top investor prospects. Some professionals, especially those with technical backgrounds think that marketing is a numbers game. Yes, you have to sometimes reach out to many to develop relationships with few but relationships is at the core of everything that gets done. Like Gitomer says, “all things equal people like to do business with friends, all things being unequal people still like to do business with friends.”

Mistake #7: Another capital raising mistake I see in the fund management space is a lack of capital raising training or fund marketing instruction. You do not have to pay to have your marketing staff trained but at the very least you should document your own best practices, processes, investor pipeline development plans so they can be easily communicated to team members, board members and then constantly improved each quarter.

Mistake #8: Missing the boat on authority positioning, educational forms of marketing, and improving their own pedigree standing within the industry.

Mistake #9: Writing off PR: Most managers shy away from or completely ignore public relations as an avenue for helping create interest and positioning for experts on their team. Many funds have now successfully employed the media to spread messages about their fund.

Mistake #10: A mistake that I see 90%+ funds doing today is using a boring, run of the milll Unique Selling Proposition (USP), or worse yet, not having one at all.

Tags: Top 10 Fund Marketing Mistakes, Top 10 fund marketing mistakes, how do I market my investment fund, fund marketing services, fund marketing consultant, third party marketing consulting advice

Additional Industry Websites

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:50:21 +0000

Fund Administration Cow Paths

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:46:08 +0000

I recently heard Eben Pagan speak in LA at a marketing conference on how business is typically conducted. I was reminded of that talk while I was in Boston last week for our Hedge Fund Premium networking event (which was great).

The streets in Boston were actually old cow paths that the city decided to just pave over to create the roads of the city. The result, is a very complicated maze of one way streets which really only make sense to the most veteran cab drivers. This is not the cows fault they simply walked typically in the direction of least resistance. The point here is that nobody stepped back and looked at where the cows had wandered and asked if there was a better way to get the project done…they simply followed where cows had walked in the past.

Pagan’s point in telling this story was that in every business, every form of marketing and even within the hedge fund business there are cow paths everywhere. Are you and your business wandering around on cow paths of what others have done in the past, or are you building a super highway straight towards your goal?

Areas to examine for fund administrators and fund managers could including hiring, capital raising, employee management, performance reporting, transparency, governance, and investor relations. Our team now often steps back and looks at competitors, other industries, and steps to the work we are trying to complete to see if there is a more direct or efficient way of completing it. Hope this story helps.
Tags: hedge fund cow paths, hedge fund processes, business processes of hedge fund managers, hedge fund managers and how they operate their small businesses

Prime Brokerage Services

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:41:29 +0000

TradeStation Prime Services: Advanced technology and a multi-custodian offering gives TradeStation the ability to serve clients as both start-ups and as larger, well established funds. Launching and running a fund is challenging and TradeStation offers the framework of practical knowledge that evolves with your business. TradeStation Prime Services: technology,vision and service. Learn more at http://TradeStationPrime.com

Contact:

Lance Baraker, Senior Managing Director at LBaraker@tradestationprime.com or by calling (917) 273-4185 (New York Office)

William Katts, Senior Managing Director at WKatts@tradestationprime.com or by calling (203) 685-20145 (New York Office)

Boston Hedge Fund Event

admin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:29:49 +0000

Our next networking event is coming up quickly, this Thursday we are hosting 3 speakers for short 15 minute discussions on hedge fund compliance, capital raising strategies, and pending regulations. We will then have 1 hour and 15 minutes of open networking time with food and drinks provided to attendees.

What: Hedge Fund Group and Hedge Fund Premium are hosting a seminar networking event in downtown Boston.

When: Thursday October 29th, 2009 6-8PM EST

Location: U Mass Club in downtown Boston at 225 Franklin Street, 33rd Floor Boston, MA 02110.

Sponsors: Malik Law Group & Armor Compliance

Entrance Fee: Waived, our sponsors have covered the costs of this event and not entrance fee will be required for this Boston event.

Speakers:

Tanya L. Goins, Malik Law Group: Harvard Alumna, Tanya L. Goins, Esq., of Malik Law Group comes back to Boston to speak about recent regulatory and industry developments affecting hedge fund managers.

Richard Wilson, Hedge Fund Group: Richard will speak about copywriting capital raising, how fund

managers can write more effective sales letters and improve their email marketing.

Douglas F. MacLean, Armor Compliance: Douglas will speak about the Private Fund Investment Advisers Registration Act of 2009, which will soon require hedge fund managers managing more than $30 million to register under the Investment Advisers Act, appoint a chief compliance officer and implement a compliance manual.

Tags: Boston hedge fund premium event, hedge fund premium event in Boston, hedge fund networking events in Boston MA, Boston hedge fund manager networking

William Edwards Deming

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:33:16 +0000

One person who has affected me in business has been William Edward Deming. He has a quote that says “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing”

I think this also goes along with another popular business quotes “What gets documented gets improved”

Most investment funds and family offices that I have worked with do not have an investor cultivation process or pipeline drawn out as a process. They do not have their ongoing investor communication strategy documented, and in many places the only documentation of their investment process is at a very high level within their marketing materials. I think many hedge funds, portfolio managers and capital raisers could benefit from using PowerPoint or a free program such as Bubbl to document their processes.

This documenting of critical processes takes little time and costs nothing to do but allows you to step back from the process and evaluate it, improve it, or delegate where appropriate. Our firm recently used Bubbl and PowerPoint together to describe a business process we were completing ourselves and we were able to not only use this internally but also externally as we trained a third party that we decided to outsource some of this work to.

The processes I have found to be valuable to document are:

Investor Acquisition Process
Current Investor Communication Strategy
Hiring New Employees
Managing your portfolio on an ongoing basis

Tags: William Edwards Deming Quotes, Quote by Edward Deming, W. Edward Deming, Quality Management and process improvement tips, documenting business processes for improvement

The Secret of Hedge Funds

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:28:33 +0000

A few days ago I recorded a short video on the future of hedge funds, it centered around how hedge funds will always be around and always do very well because of their secret weapon: innovation. Hedge Funds now invest in real estate, oil, securities, and even other hedge funds. The entrepreneurial nature of the industry globally has develop their core strength of diverse strategies that rewards them for high performance. It was humorous to read headlines about “The Death of Hedge Funds” because they are so quick to adapt and fit to survive any economic recession or fraud event.

What we are seeing now is a further evolution of what some hedge fund managers are charging their clients. In the past the 2 and 20 formula was different enough from long only fund fees that investors were eager to become involved. Now after the recent crisis hedge funds are gaining assets again but many investors are worried about liquidity and poor absolute return scenarios.

Some hedge funds are addressing this through allowing investors to clawback performance fees charged in prior years if performance is not sustained. In some cases hedge funds, such as Hermes BPK Partners are placing percentages of performance fees that are paid out over 2-3 years if positive performance keeps up.

I see this as a long-term trend and believe that eventually managers will have a percentage of their incentive fees paid out over 5 and 7 years periods of continued positive experience because that is what investors really want and innovation is what hedge funds are all about.

Tags: The Secret of Hedge Funds, Hedge Fund Innovation, Innovation within the hedge fund industry, hedge fund investor claw backs, claw back periods for hedge fund investors, investor claw back clauses

Chicago Hedge Fund Event

admin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:11:36 +0000

Seminar Networking Event: Hedge Fund Premium and the Hedge Fund Group are offering a seminar networking event for hedge fund managers and CTA funds on September 16th, 2009. The event will run from 5PM - 8PM EST in the Blue Room at the W Hotel in Chicago, IL.

At this networking event Bilal Malik from the Malik Law Group and Richard Wilson from the Hedge Fund Group will be speaking on industry regulations and capital raising best practices. The 2 educational talks will last 20 minutes and will be followed by 2 hours of open networking time where fund managers may meet with others in the industry.

Admission is $25 at the door, or free if you are a registered member of Hedge Fund Premium.com. The W Hotel is located at: 172 West Adam Street Chicago, IL 60603 (Please see the RSVP form below for a local area Google Map of the location).

Fill out my Wufoo form!

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Pictures: Here are some pictures of where the event will be held:

Tags: Hedge Fund Networking Event in Chicago, Chicago Hedge Fund Event, Hedge Fund Group Networking Events, Hedge Fund Event in Chicago IL, Alternative Investments