Happy Monday! I’m writing a quick note to discuss some great new changes that we’ve made to the Hedge Fund Calculator.

First a bit of background on the Hedge Fund Calculator.

The Hedge Fund Calculator was initially developed in 2004 as a stand-alone desktop application. This initial version of the calculator did fairly well and gave managers a simple tool to create the PDF reports and tearsheets that their investors expected.

After 2 years of active use by a dedicated following of hedge fund managers and investors, the landscape had changed in the software development arena. No longer were desktop applications sufficient to handle the needs of a customer base that was quickly growing more sophisticated and demanded an increased feature set.

The obvious answer was an online version of the Hedge Fund Calculator.

By the middle of 2006 HedgeCo had successfully launched the HedgeCo Websites division. The HedgeCo Websites team had successfully developed a product which combined our experience with specific hedge fund regulations, our calculation and analytic experience as well as put together a great design team which worked on the front-end portion of the websites. Between 2006 and 2008 the HedgeCo Websites team serviced over 350 hedge funds with their website product.

Using the technology that had been built for the HedgeCo Websites product, in 2007 we began work on the second generation calculation tool which would be deployed as a web-based “Software as a Service” platform.

With “Software as a Service” we are able to offer more features and deliver them instantly to each user. Instead of downloading a product and installing it on their local computer, they would simply access the website and use the product at whichever computer they may be using. From a maintenance standpoint we would no longer have to maintain a team who specialized in making sure each version of our application worked properly on Windows, Mac and other systems. We could now focus our attention where it mattered the most, bringing new features, interacting with our clients and responding to their needs.

With the new Hedge Fund Calculator our clients had access to multiple templates, enhanced investor management, the ability to email reports to investors and had many other extremely configurable options. After an extensive 4-month beta period we launched the new Hedge Fund Calculator in October 2008.

In the 5 months since the initial launch of the web-based Hedge Fund Calculator, we found that the main request we got from hedge fund managers is for help configuring and customizing their individual reports. In these months, our support staff has worked to not just modify simple templates, but build in new features based on clients requests.

Software as a Service + Professional Services Team = Plug & Play Solution

When evaluating where we want to take the Hedge Fund Calculator in 2009 it was clear that we needed to set up a team of experts that works very closely with our Hedge Fund Manager and investor client base.

This was the beginning of our Hedge Fund Calculator Professional Services Team.

The focus of our team is to work with individual Hedge Fund clients and consult them on the presentation of their marketing materials. We have a lot of experience through our working with our HedgeCo Websites clients and can handle any design or technology requests that are made by new clients.

Our Professional Services Team currently consists of designers, hedge fund consultants, CAIA’s and CFAs.

We are all excited about this new set of features and look forward to the enhanced interaction with you!