Archive

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.

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.

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.