HFA Holdings has announced it will re-brand and re-position their Australian subsidiary, HFA Asset Management to “Certitude Global Investments” from August 1.

The announcement said that Certitude will increasingly offer single manager products to Australian investors, expand their target market to the institutional end of the spectrum, and provide greater simplicity and transparency in line with current investor requirements.

The company also announced that it was in the final stages of negotiating an exclusive distribution agreement with a leading European based asset manager, expected to be launched in early August.

HFA suffered, as did many fund of funds during the GFC, from redemptions and liquidity in underlying investments, and has seen FUM fall from over $10bn to the current level of A$5.7bn.

Regal Funds Management, the Sydney-based alternative equity and hedge fund manager with approximately $350 million under management has sold a 30% stake in the business to Ascalon for an undisclosed sum.

Ascalon, which is part of BT Financial Group is a specialist investor in boutique fund management firms, providing a range of services to their underlying managers, in particular marketing to Australian investors.

Regal, which was formally 100% owned by brothers Philip and Andrew King, manages a series of wholesale equity-based funds including market neutral, long/short and Asian quantitative strategies and has a six-year track record. Regal's Amazon and Tasman market neutral funds, launched in June '05 and May '07 respectively have both produced annualised returns in excess of 20% since their inception.

In our latest review of the industry we provide a round-up of hedge fund news as well as giving a detailed run-down of the performance of our Model Portfolios.
As usual we include detailed analysis of performance for each strategy, industry comment and ranking tables for May 2010.

For detailed analysis of performance for each strategy, industry comment and ranking tables, please open the attached .pdf file.

ATTACHED FILESJune absolute return and hedge fund review (pdf format)

Although the bill is yet to be signed off by President Obama, the Dodd-Frank Act is likely to change and shape the US banking and financial markets landscape for some time to come, but at over 2,300 pages it's not light reading.

As much as we'd like to claim that we have burnt the midnight oil to whittle down the legislation's essential points and then calculate the likely winners and losers, we can't.

However for an excellent summary of the Highlights from Reuters, click here, and (again courtesy of Reuters) a concise list of winners and losers.

U.K. hedge funds got a shocker Thursday when they discovered the E.U. had written them into legislation to restrict banker pay. They knew their pay practices faced curbs under a separate directive, but nothing had been set in stone, and the other proposals wouldn't take effect for at least a couple of years.

Now, they're in the E.U. net from January, though it's still unclear how the rules will actually play out in the U.K. and elsewhere. Because the E.U. has left national regulators some leeway, the U.K.'s FSA could decide much of the legislation isn't relevant to hedge fund firms and other asset managers, or at least none but the very largest... Full article (subscription required): Source