Research and Selection Support
Over 15 years of direct alternatives research — hedge funds, liquid alternatives, and QIS. Independent and open-architecture.
Manager Selection
Every choice held to portfolio standard.
Fifteen years of alternatives research. A systematic framework. A network that goes well beyond the prospectus. We support investors in identifying, evaluating, and overseeing alternative managers — with the depth to make the decision, and the documentation to justify it.
Selecting a manager is the easier half. Governing the allocation over time is where most processes fall short.
How do we build a selection process rigorous enough to withstand internal and regulatory scrutiny?
How do we distinguish genuine, repeatable skill from beta dressed as alpha?
How do we monitor allocations continuously — and act when the evidence demands it?
Research infrastructure that you can see and use
Ensemble, our proprietary research platform, covers 3,000+ hedge funds, absolute-return UCITS, and QIS strategies — combining quantitative and qualitative analysis into a documented, defensible research record. Clients draw directly on its analytics and monitoring infrastructure.
Institutional-grade coverage of hedge funds, liquid alternatives, and QIS in a single platform
Qualitative and quantitative analysis combined: strategy design, factor exposures, portfolio fit
Reporting, monitoring alerts, and IC-ready documentation built into the workflow
Governance that continues after the decision is made.
A manager right twelve months ago may not be right today. Strategy drift, personnel change, and factor shifts all affect whether an allocation is still earning its place. We monitor continuously. When something changes, we say so — with the evidence documented.
Ongoing review with defined monitoring criteria and escalation triggers
Attribution across sources of risk and return, not headline performance alone<
Liquidity, fee, and mandate compliance tracked over time and reported clearly
We publish our thinking. That is part of the process.
The depth of our manager research is visible in what we write. Our Insights programme covers the structures, failure modes, and fee dynamics of alternative strategies — in the kind of detail that typically stays in an investment committee room. It is part of how we show our working, and part of what makes our selection judgments credible.
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The 27 biggest operational due diligence failures that shook institutional allocations
- Quant Hedge Funds: A Due Diligence Framework by Strategy Types
Read our thinking
QIS in July: When the Average Says Nothing, Look Underneath
July broke the pattern that had supported QIS through May and June. Carry stopped being the dominant return engine. Convexity finally earned its premium, but only selectively: in rates, not across hedging strategies as a whole. The ...
4 min read
Swap Spread Arbitrage, and the Quiet Reason It Keeps Coming Back
Swap spread arbitrage is not the basis trade. They get lumped together in every discussion of hedge fund leverage in Treasuries. They shouldn't be. Different bets, different risks, different reasons for existing. The numbers, from the ...
5 min read
The Metric Every Pitch Deck Gets Backwards
A manager triples assets in three years and every IC memo calls it validation. Bigger book, more institutional interest, stronger franchise. Almost nobody in the room asks the only question that actually matters: at what size does this ...
5 min read