With the notable shenanigans perpetrated by some hedge fund managers, managed accounts seem like a no-brainer.  After all, who wouldn’t want to be in full control of their own private hedge fund?  You could redeem whenever you wanted, get real time position-level transparency and even do your own valuations.

But as we have suggested in the past, the situation is not quite this simple.  Unfortunately, no managed account is an island.  The legal separation of assets does not sever the fund’s destiny from those of other similar (especially parri passu) managed accounts and funds.  If the managed accounts are not parri passu (for example, if each investor overlays their own risk management rules) then this problem would be solved.  But it would open up another issue: each fund would be different and would have no appropriate track record.

This is one of the points raised in a slide deck being circulated by due diligence company SwissAnalytics.  One of the slides in the presentation (available here at Barclayhedge’s website) contains the following helpful summary of the pros and cons of managed accounts: More…