FN100 Most Influential Women: Hedge Funds

Financial News has published its 2012 list of the most influential women in Europe's financial markets . Here are the profiles of those working in hedge funds.

• Valerie Benard
Head of Europe
Aksia

   Benard joined US hedge fund advisory firm Aksia three years ago to set up its London office. She is now Aksia’s most senior portfolio advisory partner in Europe and leads a team of eight. Over the past 18 months, Aksia has grown its client base in Europe by 50%, notably gaining traction in the public pension fund community. Aksia, which advises more than $40bn in hedge fund allocations, stands out for its bespoke work: it avoids the “buy list” of managers favoured by many of the larger consultants and conducts detailed research specific to each client. Benard previously spent eight years at Blackstone Asset Management.

• Leda Braga
President and head of systematic trading
BlueCrest Capital Management

At the Financial News hedge fund awards in June, Brazilian-born Braga picked up the award for the most influential woman in European hedge funds for the second year running. Under Geneva-based Braga and her team, BlueCrest’s $10.4bn systematic BlueTrend strategy has delivered annualised gains of 14.44% since it launched in April 2004. It is up 2.33% for the first nine months of this year. Performance has been helped by a new trend-following system, which it added this year. In March, BlueCrest raised £165m for a listed version of BlueTrend. Braga joined former JP Morgan colleague Mike Platt at BlueCrest in 2001 to lead the firm’s move into systematic trading.

• Dame Amelia Fawcett
Chairman
Hedge Fund Standards Board

Since becoming chairman of the UK hedge fund industry body in July last year, Fawcett has led a push to take adoption of the HFSB’s standards global and drum up support in both Asia and the US. So far about 60 hedge fund managers accounting for $215bn of assets have signed up to the HFSB’s standard (which consists of 36 pages of requirements) as well as 46 investors. A trained lawyer, Fawcett spent two decades at Morgan Stanley, rising to become vice-chairman of the firm’s European operations. She left in 2007 to become chairman of Pensions First, a start-up in the then rapidly expanding pensions buyout industry.

• Anita Nemes
Global head of capital introduction
Deutsche Bank

Nemes leads a team that is the main intermediary between the prime brokerage division’s hedge fund clients and the investor community. It won mandates on many of this year’s biggest new hedge fund launches. According to data provider HedgeFund Intelligence, Deutsche Bank is the sixth largest prime broker globally by assets. Nemes is in charge of the bank’s 10-year-old annual alternative investment survey, which this year gathered responses from investors overseeing $1.43 trillion of assets and is highly-regarded by the industry. Nemes began her career in television, but spent a decade at Merrill Lynch before joining Deutsche Bank two years ago.

• Sandra Robertson
Chief investment officer
Oxford University Endowment Management

In May, Robertson won the prestigious 100 Women in Hedge Funds European industry leadership award in recognition for her pioneering work as chief investment officer of Oxford’s university endowment fund. She joined five years ago after 14 years at the Wellcome Trust, where she was co-head of portfolio management and sat on the investment committee. During 2011, the Oxford endowment fund gained 11.7% but lost 1.6% in 2011 largely on equities and commodities, losses that would have been worse had it not been for Robertson’s decision to increase the fund’s allocation to private equity from 8% to 13%. Combined assets at the two funds under her charge rose 9% last year to £1.42 bn.

• Geraldine Sundstrom
Portfolio manager
Brevan Howard Asset Management

Geneva-based Sundstrom’s $2.5bn emerging markets fund has rebounded from its first down year – it lost 6.39% in 2011 – and is up 9.66% this year through September, outperforming the HFRI emerging markets index by four percentage points. Sundstrom spent four years as a portfolio manager at Moore Capital Management before being approached by Alan Howard to launch an emerging markets fund for Brevan Howard. Before Moore, Sundstrom worked at Citigroup and Pareto Partners. She holds a Maîtrise in applied economics and a magistère in banking finance insurance from Université Paris Dauphine, and an MSc in finance from Birkbeck College, London University.

• Galia Velimukhametova
Portfolio manager
GLG Partners

Kazakhstan-born Velimukhametova cut her teeth in fixed income research and then proprietary trading at JP Morgan. She set up the London office of US credit manager King Street Capital before being lured to GLG Partners in 2008. She launched a stand-alone European distressed debt fund in September 2008, and the $420m fund gained 13.76% in the first nine months of this year. In a Financial News profile, Velimukhametova’s former JP Morgan boss Geoff Sherry, who now runs hedge fund Lucidus Capital Partners, described her as “a bit of a Renaissance woman,” and praised her “fiercely independent analytical viewpoint” and “intellectual tenacity”.