Deals and People October 18, 2010

Forward Management Adds to Sales Force

October 18, 2010 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Forward Management, LLC has hired Victor Melinauskas as a Regional Sales Director for the Pacific Northwest Territory.
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Melinauskas will focus on serving financial advisers, as well as executing Forward’s business strategy, in the Northwest region. According to the announcement, the appointment comes as Forward continues to expand its line-up of investment products, particularly in the alternative investment area, helping to double the firm’s assets under management to $6 billion as of September 30, 2010.  

Before joining Forward, Melinauskas was a Vice President and Wealth Management Consultant for the U.S. intermediary business at American Century Investments where he managed the Northern California territory for their wealth management channel. Previously, he served as a Principal and Business Development Officer at Barclays Global Investors where he helped educate advisers on the strategic and tactical use of ETFs. He was previously a Senior Manager at Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco where he focused on strategic planning and corporate development, and also held analyst positions at WestCap Investors, Mullin Consulting and Retirement Planning Group, LPL.    

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Melinauskas holds an MBA from The Anderson School of Business at UCLA and a BA in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Products October 18, 2010

Russell and Parametric Team up on Index Series

October 18, 2010 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Russell Investments and Parametric Portfolio Associates have collaborated on a new index series that measures the return dispersion of a universe of securities.
Reported by

The Russell–Parametric Cross-Sectional Volatility Indexes (CrossVol) relies on Russell’s global index construction rules and a new calculation methodology developed by Parametric, according to a press release.  

The new CrossVol Indexes are subdivided in the same fashion as the underlying Russell Indexes, covering each of the major regions such as Global, U.S., Developed ex-U.S., and Emerging Markets. Within each region, cross-sectional volatility is calculated for separate market capitalization tiers and investment styles, including all cap, large cap, small cap, value, and growth, as well as economic sectors.  

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Paul Bouchey, Director of Research at Parametric, said in the announcement: “We monitor cross-sectional volatility in our investment process to adjust the size of our active bets. It’s a core part of our process. Having it available in the form of indexes makes our analysis much easier to perform.”   

Bouchey explained that as cross-sectional volatility increases, the payoff for an active bet increases. A good bet, for example, will pay off more with high CrossVol and less with low CrossVol. Similarly, the loss resulting from a bad bet will be more in periods of high CrossVol, but lower in periods of low CrossVol.  

More information is at http://www.crossvol.com and http://beta.parametricportfolio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MeasuringAlphaPotential.pdf.

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