Do you fantasize about having everything you ever wanted to know about a money manager at your fingertips whenever you want it?
Basil Qunibi, founder and CEO of Novus Partners Inc., New York, made that dream reality.
A hedge funds-of-funds portfolio manager in a former life, Mr. Qunibi said that as an allocator, he was intensely frustrated by the lack of detailed information about money managers he was reviewing. Frustration finally got the better of him and he left money management in 2007 to find other ex-portfolio managers, engineers and data scientists to build a massive data collection machine.
Novus now has 100 employees who collect data from a huge range of public and private sources, analyze it for investors, help them perfect their portfolio structure, and deliver it all 24/7.
“Just today, our system triggered on a hedge fund manager that had lost his ability to liquidate 70% of his portfolio. That is data that institutional investors need to know,” Mr. Qunibi said in an interview in late June.
Mr. Qunibi was cagey about identifying any of Novus' clients or even how many there are, but he did say the firm's hedge fund, sovereign wealth fund, pension fund, endowment and foundation clients manage a total of $1 trillion.
