FourWinds Capital Management, a commodity-focused investment manager, has selected SunGard’s Kiodex as its risk management, valuation, and analysis solution for the recently launched Ceres Agriculture Fund, an actively managed portfolio of agricultural and soft commodity contracts and derivatives.
Cayman Islands-based FourWinds manages several additional cross-commodity hedge funds with exposure to commodities such as energy, metals, agriculturals, and softs. Kiodex Risk Workbench is a Web-based commodities risk management application that integrates trade capture, valuation models, risk measurement, financial reporting, and independent market data.
The market data includes representative prices, forward curves, volatilities, volatility skews and correlations across the spectrum of commodity markets. Kiodex provides commodity hedge fund managers like FourWinds with independent valuation, sensitivity and VaR, as well as the requisite underlying reference and independent market data to help support both internal and investor reporting.
“SunGard’s Kiodex will support our needs for a risk management and valuation service coupled with scenario analysis to identify market opportunities. Kiodex is easy-to-use, and because of its delivery model it will not require a lot of resources on our part. A critical requirement of ours that Kiodex fulfills is the ability to support the multiple commodity segments we trade, such as grains and tropicals, as well as the ability to help us to add strategies as we grow,” says Mel Epstein, managing director and COO, FourWinds Capital Management (US) Inc.
“SunGard’s Kiodex helps cross-commodity hedge funds like FourWinds to reduce their time-to-market without having to sacrifice rigorous risk management, flexibility or scalability across the commodity complex. The Kiodex Software-as-a-Service platform can be customised to meet the needs of FourWinds and its investors, without requiring a large team or a lot of time to implement and support, regardless of the commodities added,” adds Ben Jackson, COO, SunGard’s Kiodex business unit.