A Hedge Fund’s Marriage of Convenience
The world of fund management is changing, and that creates an opportunity for smaller, specialist companies.
You’re going to need a bigger cake.
Photographer: Dimas Ardian/BloombergThe appetite for low-cost passive funds is driving evolution at both ends of the scale in the asset management business. The biggest firms need to add more exotic products which can still command higher fees than their vanilla funds. And that means there’s an opportunity for smaller specialist managers to sell themselves to their larger brethren.
Sushil Wadhwani is selling the quantitative hedge-fund firm he founded after finishing his term of office as a Bank of England policy maker in 2002. Prudential Financial Inc. of the U.S., a member of the $1 trillion club, is buying London-based Wadhwani Asset Management on undisclosed terms, and will add WAM’s $1.4 billion of assets to the $128 billion its QMA unit oversees.