Wall Street Journal

Windforce Capital

Windforce Ventures

Windforce

WINDFORCE

• 2-Hand

• Legendary Bow

• 376.6
• Damage Per Second

• 80–458 Damage
• 1.40 Attacks per Second

Primary

• +330–524 Dexterity

Secondary

• 30.0–50.0% Chance to Knockback on Hit

• One of 7 Magic Properties (varies)
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Arcane Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Poison Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Lightning Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Holy Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Cold Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Fire Damage
  • +(610–745)–(731–926) Damage
• +3 Random Magic Properties

• Account Bound

Unique Equipped

For other uses for Windforce, see Windforce.

Windforce is a unique bow. It makes an appearance in Diablo I, Diablo II and Diablo III. With the highest possible maximum damage of any bow, Windforce increases in power with higher levels. This makes it an impressive Mana leech weapon. Like another unique bow, Cliffkiller, its ability to knockback enemies will be handy for keeping enemies at bay.

Windforce was once considered a weapon of choice for a bowazon, but with the release of Ladder mode, this honor has been taken by runewords such as Faith or Wrath.

StatsEdit

Windforce
Hydra Bow
Two-Hand Damage: 35 to (241-547)
Required Level: 73
Required Strength: 134
Required Dexterity: 167
Bow Class – Slow Attack Speed
+250% Enhanced Damage
+3-309 To Maximum Damage (+3.125 Per Character Level)
20% Increased Attack Speed
6-8% Mana Stolen Per Hit
Heal Stamina Plus 30%
+10 To Strength
+5 To Dexterity
Knockback

A Commodity trading advisor (CTA) is US financial regulatory term for an individual or organization who is retained by a fund or individual client to provide advice and services related to trading in futures contracts, commodity options and/or swaps.^[1][2] They are responsible for the trading within managed futures accounts. The definition of CTA may also apply to investment advisors for hedge funds and private funds including mutual funds and exchange-traded funds in certain cases.^[3] CTAs are generally regulated by the United States federal government through registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission(CFTC) and membership of the National Futures Association (NFA).^[4]

Mr. Montoya joined Renaissance Technologies as a partner in 1999 to help the firm explore and implement derivatives strategies. Subsequently, he was a member of the trading team and worked with researchers on a variety of products and strategies that involved futures and options trading. He also helped develop a merger arbitrage strategy that was added to the fund. In addition, he worked with senior managers on exposure management and risk reduction techniques for the Medallion fund.

Post Renaissance, Mr. Montoya wrote investment articles and eventually started a venture capital fund. The two year old fund, Windforce Ventures, has already had two of its portfolio companies acquired.

He began his career with BEA Associates and worked in the Derivatives group where he managed institutional money for large foundations and pension funds. He designed and implemented hedging and exposure management strategies in foreign exchange, equity indices and commodities. Also, BEA was an early pioneer in the use of portable alpha and Mr. Montoya helped manage those strategies. BEA was acquired by Credit Suisse.  Mr. Montoya graduated from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1989.

Mr. Leung was a founding partner at LyonRoss Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund, where he managed BPW Alphanumeric a volatility arbitrage hedge fund. He also created and managed a risk parity/endowment model mutual fund for Actinver Securities, one of the largest banks in Mexico. The Actinver Dinamo fund was the first all asset mutual fund offered in Mexico.

Prior to LyonRoss, Waiman worked with Mr. Montoya as a portfolio manager at BEA Associates, which was a $60 billion dollar money manager when it was acquired by Credit Suisse. At BEA/Credit Suisse he managed portable alpha strategies for large institutional clients including Alcoa, CalPERS, Ford, UPS and the Rockefeller Foundation. While at Credit Suisse, he was also on the development team that created the Credit Suisse Commodity fund.

Mr. Leung graduated Magna Cum Laude from NYU in 1990 with a BA in Economics where he was also an All American fencer. Mr. Leung started his career at Lehman Brothers as an equity research analyst followed by working in the options pit of the Coffee Cocoa and Sugar Exchange for The Options Group.

A CTA generally acts as an asset manager, following a set of investment strategies utilizing futures contracts and options on futures contracts on a wide variety of physical goods such as agricultural products, forest products, metals, and energy, plus derivative contracts on financial instruments such as indices, bonds, and currencies.^[5] The trading programs employed by CTAs can be characterized by their market strategy, whether trend following or market neutral, and the market segment, such

Hedge Fund

The S&P 500 ended up 0.06 points, or 0.003%, to 2108.63, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 5.41 points, or 0.03%, to 17745.98. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 17.05 points, or 0.33%, to 5128.78.

It also makes sense given the fact that the economic data released today was neither good nor bad enough to change anyone’s mind, especially not U.S. GDP growth, which rose just 2.3%. RBS economist Michelle Girard explains:

Q2 real GDP advanced by 2.3% annualized, close to expectations. The change in real GDP in Q1 was revised up from -0.2% annualized to +0.6% (however growth in the second half of 2014 was revised down from an annualized average pace of 3.6% to 3.2%).  None of this will alter perceptions of the economy or the outlook for Fed policy.

With respect to the composition of GDP, consumer spending was a bit stronger (+2.9% annualized) than we had anticipated, while business investment was weaker (-0.6% annualized), as spending on equipment was surprisingly soft (-4.1% annualized). The contributions to growth from trade (+0.1 percentage points) and inventories (-0.1 percentage points) were very smaller (and offsetting) in Q2.  Finally, government spending rose modestly (+0.8% annualized).

There are three major styles of investment employed by CTAs: technical, fundamental, and quantitative. Technical traders invest after analysing chart patterns. They often employ partially automated systems, such as computer software programs, to follow price trends, perform technical analysis, and execute trades. Successful trend following, or using technical analysis techniques to capture swings in markets may drive a CTA’s performance and activity to a large degree. In 2010, Dr. Galen Burghardt, adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, found a correlation of 0.97 between a subset of trend following CTAs and a broader CTA index from the period 2000-2009, indicating that speculative technical trend following had been dominant within the CTA community.^[6] Fundamental traders attempt to forecast prices by analyzing supply and demand factors, amongst other market information, in their attempt to realize profits. Other non-trend following CTAs include short-term traders, spread trading and individual market specialists.^[7] Fundamental CTA’s typically invest based on analysis of the core markets they are trading, by analysing weather patterns, farm yields, understanding oil drilling volumes etc. Quantitative CTA’s do statistical or quantitative analysis on market price patterns and try to make predictions based on such research. Many Quantitative CTA’s have backgrounds in Science, mathematics, statisticsand engineering.

Windforce Capital

Windforce Ventures

Windforce

Windforce Capital best top premier

Windforce Ventures

Windforce

rigorous and structured investment process. We quantify most aspects of our investment process, including the excess return we believe each security in our investment universe will generate over a particular horizon, and the risk we expect a particular portfolio to experience relative to its benchmark. The objective of this note is to explain why we believe a quantitative approach makes sense, and what advantages and disadvantages such an approach has relative to more traditional approaches. We believe that quantitative techniques are tools. They are ways of applying traditional approaches to making investment decisions in a disciplined and systematic way. Thus our approach to investing is not at odds with a traditional approach. We use the same tools many traditional portfolio managers use, but attempt to apply them in a very systematic and disciplined way, avoiding emotion and slippages in implementation.

Another big holding is Dyax (DYAX), which is developing a treatment for hereditary angioedema, a hive-like swelling but one located deeper under the skin. Patients can inject Dyax’s antibody once every couple of weeks to prevent attacks; more than 10,000 people are thought to be affected. Kolchinsky expects the antibody to finish Phase 3 trials in late 2016 and go on the market in 2017. He puts Dyax’s eventual valuation at three to five times its recent $3.9 billion.

The February issue of Bloomberg Markets Magazine contains its annual ranking of the 100 best performing large ($1 billion-plus AUM) hedge funds of the previous year.

We have the top 30 for you here.

In 2013, only 16 hedge funds were able to outperform the S&P 500, and for the most part those 16 did the same thing — go long stocks all the way.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/30-most-successful-hedge-funds-of-2013-2014-1?op=1#ixzz3f9xyZeXN

Ardelyx (ARDX), which RA bought in May, is testing a new drug, Tenapanor, which has had promising early results in treating chronic constipation. If it gains approval, Kolchinsky believes that the drug alone could have a market value of more than $2 billion, or about seven times the entire company’s stock valuation of $294 million.

With biotech stocks up 30% annually in the past five years, it’s fair to ask if they are overvalued, Kolchinsky admits. But, he says, “biotech has generated amazing breakthroughs that no one, five or 10 years ago, would have thought probable. Gene therapy is now starting to work. A whole new field of oncology has emerged. For cancers that were previously thought to be incurable, what appear to be some cures are starting to emerge. There is more to come.”

An added fillip: Big pharmaceutical companies generate $220 billion in annual cash flow yearly, giving them ample resources to buy interesting biotech companies.

This year’s gains have been fueled in part by a booming market for mergers, particularly in the health-care sector, that is paying off for traders who predicted potential targets and acquirers well in advance of any deal announcements. Money managers also said they are finding stock prices are moving increasingly out of sync after years in lock step, giving them more opportunity to make money zipping in and out of particular companies.

Historically, StatArb evolved out of the simpler pairs trade^[4] strategy, in which stocks are put into pairs by fundamental or market-based similarities. When one stock in a pair outperforms the other, the poorer performing stock is bought long with the expectation that it will climb towards its outperforming partner, the other is sold short. This hedges risk from whole-market movements.

StatArb considers not pairs of stocks but a portfolio of a hundred or more stocks—some long, some short—that are carefully matched by sector and region to eliminate exposure to beta and other risk factors. Portfolio construction is automated and consists of two phases. In the first or “scoring” phase, each stock in the market is assigned a numeric score or rank that reflects its desirability; high scores indicate stocks that should be held long and low scores indicate stocks that are candidates for shorting. The details of the scoring formula vary and are highly proprietary, but, generally (as in pairs trading), they involve a short term mean reversion principle so that, e.g., stocks that have done unusually well in the past week receive low scores and stocks that have underperformed receive high scores.^[5] In the second or “risk reduction” phase, the stocks are combined into a portfolio in carefully matched proportions so as to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, market and factor risk. This phase often uses commercially available risk models like MSCI/Barra/APT/Northfield/Risk Infotech/Axioma to constrain or eliminate various risk factors.^[6]

Broadly speaking, StatArb is actually any strategy that is bottom-up, beta-neutral in approach and uses statistical/econometric techniques in order to provide signals for execution. Signals are often generated through a contrarian mean-reversion principle but can also be designed using such factors as lead/lag effects, corporate activity, short-term momentum, etc. This is usually referred to^{[by whom?]} as a multi-factor approach to StatArb.

Because of the large number of stocks involved, the high portfolio turnover and the fairly small size of the effects one is trying to capture, the strategy is often implemented in an automated fashion and great attention is placed on reducing trading costs.

Statistical arbitrage has become a major force at both hedge funds and investment banks. Many bank proprietary operations now center to varying degrees around statistical arbitrage trading.

With U.S. stocks and bonds rising ever higher, 2014 was a pretty good year on Wall Street. But for many big financial players it was not as great a year as you might expect. The good: After being in the doldrums for years, the mergers and acquisitions business finally broke through in a huge way, flooding Wall Street with rich fees and paydays. It could end up being the biggest acquisition boom year ever. The bad: investment banks kept suffering declines in their key trading businesses and most hedge funds continued to trail far behind the broader U.S. stock market—with some prominent money managers getting hurt badly by specific market moves, like the slump in oil prices. Still, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index hitting new highs going into the end of the year, there were some winners on Wall Street in 2014.

Stat Arb

nyse

BARRONS

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Bloomberg