TA Associates Invests $50 Million to Recapitalize Quantitative Analytics, and more

TA Associates Invests $50 Million to Recapitalize Quantitative Analytics

Private equity and buyout firm TA Associates completed a $50 million majority recapitalization of Chicago-based Quantitative Analytics, a provider of database integration and analysis solutions to the financial services industry.

Quantitative Analytics develops financial software and data applications for traditional investment managers, hedge funds, investment bankers and proprietary trading desks. The company's main platform, MarketQA, integrates historical and daily updated fundamental and pricing data, which is used for financial data retrieval and analysis. The company complements this platform with additional products and services that offer global pricing, fixed-income data and high-frequency data solutions via Fas Tick and Fas Tick RT -- TA Associate's high compression financial data capture, storage and analysis tools.

"Our investment in Quantitative Analytics underscores our confidence in its robust product offering and growth potential," stated Todd Crockett, a principal at TA Associates, in the release, who will join the company's board of directors. Crockett further added that Quantitative Analytics is "representative of the high growth, recurring revenue and profitable companies in which TA invests."

According to Bill Aronin, cofounder and president of Quantitative Analytics, who is quoted in the release, the partnership with TA Associates positions the company to accelerate new product development, look for new acquisition opportunities and strengthen its position in the database integration and analysis solutions industry.

Creditex Hires Garcia as Global Head of IT Infrastructure

Creditex hired Rolando Garcia as global head of IT infrastructure, according to the company, a leading player in providing electronic execution services for the credit derivatives business.

Garcia joins Creditex from Datek, (now owned by Ameritrade) where he most recently was chief network architect. He reports to Jim Miller, chief technology officer for Creditex.

Garcia's appointment comes on the heels of explosive growth in credit default swaps (CDS) and CDS index trading, the company said in a release. In response to this growth, Creditex determined it required a global infrastructure head to maintain oversight of the trading platform in addition to being responsible for critical issues, such as client connectivity, system stability and security, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery. "Due to the tremendous growth Creditex has experienced, we needed to be able to support the ever-expanding scale of our platform with more reliability," stated Miller upon announcing Garcia' hiring.

During his six-year tenure at Datek, Garcia worked extensively on the firm's infrastructure utilized by its Web-based trading service for individual investors. Earlier on, he served as network manager for Telerep and Jefferson Pilot.

StreamVPN Launches Buy-Side Framework for Valuing Research Ideas

Stream VPN launched Alpha Pool Buyside, an application that enables money managers to identify and share the best-performing equity trading ideas generated by their internal equity-research teams.

The new product complements StreamVPN's existing Alpha Network, an application that helps fund managers filter and track brokers' ideas.

Alpha Pool Buyside provides a shared publishing and performance-tracking framework in which buy-side analysts input their research ideas, which are stored and tracked in separate virtual portfolios, the company said in a release. These portfolios are pooled in a common database, which can be sorted and searched by sector, market cap, location or a range of other factors.

Managers can view performance of their internal analysts by sector, team and individual to determine which internal fundamental and quantitative research is generating the most alpha -- above market returns.

"As sell-side firms restructure their research operations, money managers are building out their internal research teams and looking for new ways to stimulate and reward in-house alpha generation," stated Erik Wastlund, StreamVPN's managing director North America, in the release.

"Alpha Pool Buyside provides an innovative framework for idea sharing and performance measurement that can help money managers maximize the value of their proprietary research ideas," Wastlund further added in the release.