A speech by ASIC Commissioner, Greg Tanzer, delivered at the AIMA Australia Hedge Fund Forum, Sydney, 10 September 2013
Introduction
Today I am pleased to release our report, The Australian hedge funds sector and systemic risk, setting out the findings of our 2012 survey into the systemic risk posed by local hedge funds. This is our second such survey: the first was in 2010.
The report gives a general overview of the size, makeup and performance of the sector, to contextualise our findings. It explains how we came to conduct these surveys, how our work fits into a bigger international initiative, ways hedge funds might cause systemic risk and how the data we collect informs our deliberations.
Much of the benefit of these surveys comes from repeating the exercise, as a time series will allow trends to be seen. To help understand the 2012 data, and where useful comparisons can be drawn, we have included data from our 2010 survey.
I will conclude with some remarks about changes we propose to make to how we define hedge funds for the purposes of excluding them from the shorter PDS regime.