This publication brings latest news from the North America wealth management industry.

Family Office Networks, the US-based organization, said it has expanded the scope of its hedge fund division to help emerging and established investment managers raise assets.

The offering consists of a new portal on the FON website, where hedge funds and their managers can put themselves up for potential selection. FON is not paid by those entities appearing on this portal.

"New managers typically rely on 'friends and family' money or perhaps a key investor to launch their fund. Once they've launched, however, they want allocations from family offices but find them to be hard to identify and get in front of to tell their story. That's where we come in,” Andrew Schneider, founder and president of FON, said in a statement. 

Later, Schneider told this news service that he has an extensive hedge fund industry background, and that he and his FON colleagues noticed that in recent months, immediately before and after the November presidential elections in the US, there has been an increase of family office interest in hedge funds, a sector that had languished for several years. Its fortunes had contrasted with those of private equity, for example.

FON said its network covers 7,000 family offices globally.

At the moment, popular hedge fund strategies, FON said, include equity-based strategies such as Long-Short, Global Macro and Market Neutral, among others.  

After a period of relatively modest returns in recent years, hedge funds’ popularity among wealth management clients has hit headwinds. According to a report by Bloomberg (Jan. 3, 2017), investors in regions such as Asia have gotten anxious. It quoted Singapore-based Taurus Wealth Advisors Pte, a multi-family office, saying clients have been disappointed with returns and balking at high fees, and have shifted to private equity instead. On the flipside, some data shows a more encouraging picture for the $3 trillion global hedge fund sector. According to Chicago-headquartered Hedge Fund Research, funds posted gains across all strategies in December last year, with the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index® rising to a record value level as oil prices surged, equities gained and US interest rates increased into year end. The HFRI FWC advanced 1.1 per cent in the month, bringing the annual return to 5.6 per cent and the index value to 12,966, surpassing the prior record from May 2015 and the highest value since inception in January 1990. 

Family Office Networks was founded by the Schneider Family Office as a community for families to share information about potential investments.