Geneva-based software company FinLab has launched PackHedge, a tool for analysing hedge fund results. “It’s all about integration of the many aspects of the fund universe,” said Serge Billieux the founder of FinLab in material posted on hedge-fund site Albourne Village, adding: “I was so fed up with the quality of information and the productivity of the tools available to me as a fund analyst, I decided that there had to be a better way”.
PackHedge, the product he and the team at FinLab created, solves a number of complex problems at one stroke. Firstly it gathers information from all the usual sources – coping with many different technologies and data models - to create your own centralized database of funds, indices, currencies, companies, people. Then it permits the user of the product to work with this information through simple screens with the ability to point, click, drag and drop the objects as you like and access a large list of analytical tools producing independent MS-Excel charts and spreadsheets in seconds.
“I really enjoy seeing us as participants in a Darwinian race for the best data model. We’ve spent a lot of time defining our data model”, said Serge. “The quantitative and qualitative data you need to do due diligence and performance analysis are not static and inevitably comes from various sources”. PackHedge deals with this by allowing records to have multiple sources and the user to rank these in terms of reliability in each case. Serge explained: “Say you trust data from your own gathering above some data vendor XYZ, then you would tell the system to give you your own data first, and only when that’s not available will the data from company XYZ be shown.” Each piece of data is source-stamped identifying the feeder or the individual that input the information and is also time-stamped with the date and time that the information was entered.
FinLab’s customers located in Geneva, Zurich, Paris, London, New-York and Tokyo range from a large fund-of-funds operation with over $5bn under management to a number of family offices, smaller fund of funds and hedge fund promoters. The Swiss customers are now extending the system to their overseas offices. The product has evolved a lot since 1999 when it was dreamt of, and is now in version 2.3. “We started with C++, but quickly decided to move to Java and XML,” he added. “We’ve invested over 350 man months of effort and it’s paid off, the product is robust, quick and intuitive to use. It takes seconds to produce very sophisticated graphs and tables.”
Another innovative feature of PackHedge is a data-interchange protocol that allows users to send data around the globe and import it into the databases of other PackHedge users. Serge is passionate about the need to provide more timely data to the buy side of hedge funds industry, “We’re happy to provide these XML based “*.pac” files to the industry. It can leverage tremendously any group of business partners by boosting the productivity of each node on a many to many network. Hopefully, it will improve the liquidity of information and increase transparency.”
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