The Key to Evaluating Investment Opportunities

The critical variables in an asset management data warehouse are position, performance, risk, and transaction. Asset managers have had the unenviable task of assembling this data from a variety of intelligence sources to generate the actual calculations, insights, and reports to assess opportunities. To make matters worse, managers had to cobble together incompatible tools, use a variety of applications, and in most cases had single-use solutions that would only assist with risk or performance; but rarely both.

Data warehouse solutions are critical for asset managers because the data can be leveraged to create insightful analytics, predictive insights, reporting, and more importantly more profitable investment decisions. The challenge for most funds in creating an operational data warehouse is assembling and normalizing disparate data from a significant number of internal and external sources.

RyanEyes Collimate Delivers Actionable Intelligence

In this section, we will walk through a short commercial for the RyanEyes “Collimate” Data Warehouse. We don’t like to do commercials in our blog but in this case, it will make it easier to discuss the benefits of a data warehouse. Yes, we called our Data Warehouse “Collimate” – I’ll stop using quotes around Collimate now. Collimate means “to bring into line; make parallel. to adjust accurately the line of sight.” I loved this definition because that is exactly the purpose of a data warehouse – to bring intelligence, alignment, and to deliver a clear decision-making capability from a mass of fragmented, diverse, often unrelated data.

Our vision was that RyanEyes’ Collimate serves as the software solution that provides our asset management clients including hedge funds and sell-side firms the transparency, automation, and actionable insights to make better investing decisions. In addition, our proprietary data warehouse solution ties to a variety of data sources to deliver our clients a new level of information across the front, middle and back-office including their research, trading, and compliance insights.

The benefit of RyanEyes Collimate to our clients is that they have the ability to leverage the raw data in their data warehouse to more easily manage and monitor risk, compliance, transactions, and tax issues and obligations.

The real value is that RyanEyes delivers the information seamlessly, securely, quickly, and uses graphs and tables, in an easy-to-read single-pane-of-glass format. Asset managers eliminate manual spreadsheet entry, constant data tracking, onerous report writing, and concerns about integration with current systems.

The Benefits of Designing & Developing a Data Warehouse

In the 80/20 world data warehouses have transitioned the work of fund and asset managers from spending 80% of their time collecting, assembling, and making some sense of data to now spending 80% of their time on income-generating decisions. Market data from Bloomberg or Reuters, security research, positions, cash, sentiment, counterparty data and much more can be channeled into a single warehouse to be normalized and linked to create visuals, comparisons, and calculations that are the cornerstones of intelligent decisions.

Data Warehouses take in raw, unstructured data in order to assemble, normalize and deliver insights that allow asset managers to improve investment decisions

A critical element of understanding data warehouses is that in the vast majority of cases, data warehouses do not work perfectly out of the box. Many of the software solutions are bespoke projects that need to be customized to provide the output that the client requires in their business. Further, the data warehouse serves as the foundation from which data can be leveraged by software like our RyanEyes product to deliver a single pane of glass interface that ultimately deliver the benefits we’ll discuss below.

RISK CALCULATIONS & INTELLIGENT ANALYTICS

Calculate VaR, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino, Shock Analysis Scenarios, and Volatility in near real-time. Collimate uses R calculations to quickly crunch the numbers for your intraday reporting needs.

PERFORMANCE TRACKING BY FUND MANAGER

Calculate precise returns by fund manager through strategy-based reporting. Fund manager shared costs, expenses and returns are calculated in near real-time to assess the strategies and performance of individual fund managers.

INVESTMENT CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES BY MANAGER

Classify securities by manager without having to maintain multiple classification schemes for each. Collimate provides the ability to configure a “master” classification scheme for each security and then override for each manager as needed.

MONITOR WEBSITES AND STORE INFORMATION

Automatically and repeatedly, process multiple web sites’ information; store that information and determine when and if it has changed.

PROCESS E-MAILS WITH ATTACHMENTS

Automatically process hundreds of emails automatically; saving the email attachments, reading the values embedded within a PDF and then storing that information intelligently.

COMPLIANCE REPORTING

Manage schedules 13F, 13G, and 13H and monitor suspicious trading activity. Collimate provides monitoring of positions and activity, thus, prompting fund administrators to file when appropriate.

TAX REPORTING AND ACCOUNTING REPOSITORY

Collimate Integrates with Geneva/ APX and other industry standard systems to capture fund administration’s detailed reporting and to store your balance sheet, income statement and any supporting reports. Collimate will allow you to determine the best tax lot relief method for closing lots in your trading system. Track both on and off-balance sheet values as well and integrate bespoke spreadsheet data into your repository.

As we work toward the conclusion, we hope we’ve made clear the numerous benefits of investing in a data warehouse. A solution that will assemble, collate, and present the critical data that asset managers and fund administrators need to leverage to allow the firm to both maximize investment opportunities and handle the regulations and requirements of the firm. Let’s sum it up in a bulleted list to make sure we’ve captured and touched on the uses:

• Track Taxlots, Profit and Loss and Cash across all asset types, including Equities, Private Equity, CDS, CDX, MBS, Real Estate, Interest Rate Swaps, RMBS, CMBS and bespoke loans
• Task management engine for ensuring data quality
• Checklist functionality to view when tasks and data are complete or not complete
• A data repository based in SQL that can utilize Snowflake, AWS Redshift
• Many choices for viewing data; including, Desktop, iPhone, iPad and others.
• Temporal Database to track all instances of your soft and hard closes
• Flexible Security Classification Scheme
• Compliance Reporting
• Tax Reporting
• Integration with industry standard accounting systems and many fund administrators

Conclusion

The ability to collect, normalize and analyze data from a variety of sources including market data, prices, positions, risk, trades; frankly, an almost unlimited sources and amount of data has changed the way sell-side firms and funds manage their investments and business. Investment analysis, compliance, tax reporting, and P&L are now compiled, and reports generated quickly and easily.

Data warehouses do need to be built to specifications to provide firms the analysis and reporting they require to operate successfully. We’ve had the experience of having to deal with data warehouses that are integrated poorly, don’t provide the information firms require and are difficult to use. Collimate is the result of lessons learned from many of these experiences. RyanEyes data warehouse solution provides integration, customization, intelligence across front, middle and back office operations, however, most importantly, it is purpose-built to be user-friendly and generate analysis quickly and efficiently.

To Learn More About How to Leverage a Data Warehouse in Your Firm – Contact Us, We Are Happy to Help – 1 (347) 759 0105.

You Can Also Fill Out Our Contact Us Form Here to Talk with a RyanEyes Consultant – https://www.ryaneyes.com//contact-us/