Third-party hedge-fund and managed-futures provider hires industry veterans. Alternative-investment platform provider Altegris Investments expanded its business-development team with the appointments last month of former executives from Tremont Group and Kensington Investment Group.

Robert Rosenbaum, who spent more than eight years at Rye, N.Y.-based fund-of-hedge-fund manager Tremont, will focus on building and maintaining business for Altegris' third-party hedge-fund and managed-future platform with high-end RIAs and with private and commercial family offices and east of the Mississippi River.

Here to stay

Adam Gallegos, a vice-president in the capital markets division of Orinda, Calif.-based real-estate and infrastructure fund manager Kensington Investment Group, is responsible for business development of the broker-dealer channel in Altegris' western U.S. region.

Although the hedge-fund industry gave up more than 20% of its value by the end of 2008 and shrunk dramatically as a result of redemptions, traditional investments, by and large, did worse.

The investment platforms Rosenbaum, Gallegos and their internal and external colleagues at Altegris offer are for intermediaries that recognize the significance of alternatives' strong performance relative to broad-market benchmarks "and understand that alternatives are here stay but who lack the infrastructure to do their own research," says Altergris' CEO Jon Sundt. "They come to us and get an entire menu of hedge funds and managed futures."

Adds Sundt: "It's clear that the glamour surrounding the hedge-fund universe has lifted, and that what investors want now, along with performance, is liquidity and transparency."

Gallegos worked at Kensington Investment Group for more than seven years. Rosenbaum spent more than eight years at Tremont before he left the firm early in 2008.

Investors have allocated more than $2 billion in trading level to alternative investments available through La Jolla, Calif.-based Altegris.

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