Hedge Funds.

Client & context

Greenwich Alternative Investments (GAI), founded in 1992, was among the first firms to collect data and research the hedge fund universe at scale, and maintains one of the oldest hedge fund databases. GAI wanted to give its clients easier ways to search and analyse that data.

The challenge

The database held continuously updated data on more than 5,000 hedge funds. Investors needed to find relevant funds quickly, compare them side by side and test how a combination of funds would have performed - without exporting data to spreadsheets.

What we built

• Search and screening across GAI's fund database.
• Tables and graphs generated on the fly from the live database - different chart types for different analyses.
• Portfolios - registered users save chosen funds, set a benchmark and a time period, and analyse summary statistics.
• Weighting and pro-forma performance - users set each fund's weight and generate a pro-forma monthly performance for the portfolio.

Process & timeline

We built the system rapidly, starting from the analyses GAI's clients ran most often and working back to the data queries behind them, so charts render quickly on a large data set. Delivery took 4 months.

Results

The Hedge Funds web app gave GAI's clients a faster way to research funds and brought productivity, lower costs and greater capacity to the business. Today GAI's database covers over 6,000 alternative investment funds (source).

Fund research that used to need exports and spreadsheets now happens in the browser, from screening to a pro-forma portfolio.

At our current rates, a build of this scope would cost about £25–45k — an estimate from the feature list, not the original invoice.

If we built it today

Today we would add saved screens and alerts, export of portfolio reports, and a secure API for institutional clients, with performance tuned for much larger data sets. A first release of a product like this typically takes 6–8 weeks; our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. Discovery starts from £3,000.

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