What does Northwater deal mean for Ontario's ETF?
– updated –
It wasn’t even a month ago when our industry’s allies at Queen’s Park announced that they had chosen Northwater Capital Management Inc. to review the applications for funds such as ours to become a “qualified investor” under Ontario’s new $250 million 5-year Emerging Technologies Fund.
I missed it yesterday, but Northwater has done a deal with a firm called Crestline Investors (hat tip NYT Deal Book and CN). Under the deal, Northwater’s President is staying on to run the Toronto office of Crestline:
Crestline Investors, an alternative asset manager based in Texas, said Thursday that it had acquired the hedge fund of funds business and related assets of Northwater Capital Management.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition will add about $683 million in fund of funds assets to the $3.6 billion that Crestline currently manages. The firm is also acquiring about $1.5 billion of client assets in Northwater’s investment management platform.
What, if anything, will it mean for the ETF to now that one of its two “managers” have themselves shed their main product line of analyzing and choosing hedge fund managers? Hopefully no hiccups are coming given the industry’s excitement about the sheer potential of the ETF.
MRM
No Northwater was not acquired. Northwater did sell some assets to Crestline – part of a plan to focus more of its resources on its other businesses including its IP Fund. So no American service provider is involved.
David
Thanks for clearing up the NYT piece for us. The headline “Crestline buys Canadian Fund of Funds business” suggested something else to me than what actually took place, which is a sale of certain lines of business.
MRM