Ronnie Wexler
It's so clear to me that there are so many exciting things going on in the hedge fund industry right now. What are some of the things that are most in focus for you?
Mike Webb
Well, I think first and foremost, the industry's thriving, right? Returning returns are great. We saw that loud and clear in our hedge fund symposium, where we had 800 participants and over a third of the hedge fund AUM.
Right. The the the excitement was palpable. I think some of the biggest trend in the industry is we have an industry where the bigger continues to get bigger, and that's across hedge funds as well as as well as asset managers. And they're they're no longer constrained by capital. They're more constrained by opportunity and talent. And we're seeing these these institutions become bigger, go into more geographies, more products and more strategies.
And we're seeing that across many things. We're seeing hedge funds setting up private credit shops. We're seeing the line between discretion area hedge funds and quantitative hedge funds blur as we're seeing best practices between the of each of them coming together. We're seeing, more and more clients looking to employ portable alpha strategies. So it's an exciting time.
Ronnie
Another thing that's been interesting for me to watch, and something that I'm happy that we're a real part of, is the growth in emerging markets, particularly China. Why do you think that this is such an interesting area of investment and focus for our clients?
Mike
Well, I think it's it's part of the strategy or part of the schematic of the big getting bigger. Right? You have to be involved in Asia if you're a big global asset manager, and if you're involved in Asia, you have to be involved in China. Right? It's a it's a massive markets. It's growing. It's untapped. And there's a lot of alpha to get into to create.
Ronnie
Another thing that struck me, the focus on quant, the focus on machine learning, the focus on AI, the appreciation of the new paradigm that we're in in that sense, and how people are using that to fine tune their returns and their strategies.
Mike
Yeah, this is a scale game, and on both the sell side and on the buy side. And part of that scale is the technological scale you need to deliver. You need to deliver alpha and you need to in the technological scale, you need to to to enhance your process and improve your processes. So it's a bit of a technological arms race across everything that's happening on the sell side, as well as everything that's happening in the hedge funds.
Ronnie
Yeah. Look, I kept hearing from many clients, but this is one of the most exciting investment environments they've ever been a part of. Some in ten, 20, 30 years in the business.
Mike
It's incredibly exciting to be part of, the, this the cycle of the industry.
It feels like we're a bit of a renaissance of the financial services industry. So it's great to be part of, of a, of an expanding ecosystem.
Ronnie
Absolutely.
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