Nov 8, 2017

Nov 7 2017 | 10:50pm ET Liquid alternatives advisor Beachhead Capital Management has appointed NYU Stern professor and global expert on competition Dr. Pankaj Ghemawat to oversee the firm’s research advisory board. The board focuses on structural changes within the asset management industry, Beachhead said in a statement. Ghemawat currently serves as a full professor at both the NYU Stern School of Business and IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Beforehand, he was a professor at Harvard Business School, where he was the youngest person appointed to a full professorship. He is the author of eight books and more than one hundred articles. “Dr. Ghemawat and I have spent the past decade discussing how the asset management industry is changing – for instance, the impact of widespread fee reduction, the efforts of higher cost players to slow the compression of margins, the misallocation of capital to strategies like hedge funds where too much of the value created is lost in fees,” noted Andrew Beer, managing member of Beachhead. “Dr. Ghemawat will bring a rigorous, unique and powerful analytic framework that will enable Beachhead to capitalize on key industry trends, such as passive vs. active management, the rise of asset allocation models, and greater transparency around costs and fees,” he added Ghemawat joins Dr. Matt Grayson, a former academic mathematician who built quantitative trading strategies at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to improve the accuracy of Beachhead’s proprietary replication-based models; and Heiko Ebens, who designed one of the first and most successful replication-based indices while overseeing quantitative equity research at Merrill Lynch. “Hedge funds constitute a truly remarkable industry in terms of the extent to which they manage to extract for themselves the surplus they create instead of passing it on to investors,” added Dr. Ghemawat in the statement. “This makes them ripe for disruption with low cost/high liquidity strategies.” The research developed jointly with Dr. Ghemawat will be made available to the public through forthcoming articles in leading industry periodicals. Beachhead said. New York-based Beachhead is a hedge fund advisory firm focused on delivering hedge fund performance coupled with low fees, daily liquidity and transparency. The firm manages approximately $600 million and is registered with the SEC and CFTC. In addition, Beachhead publishes extensive research into the drivers of hedge fund performance, industry changes, liquid alternatives and related areas.