Since its inception three years ago, Nitor's rapid growth has been powered by a sophisticated multi-strategy approach encompassing volatility and dispersion techniques in a portfolio focusing largely on equities, with a derivatives overlay. But its on-going success presented a challenge. According to Julio Erse, partner and co-founder of Nitor, "In the beginning, like so many other hedge funds we ran the business on spreadsheets. But as the fund grew we soon began experiencing the performance and functional limitations inherent in such solutions. Unless we made a transition from spreadsheets to something with far more risk management capabilities, our growth and decision-making ability with respect to advanced trading strategies would be greatly compromised."

Early this year Nitor began a search for a long-term answer. "An in-house solution was never seriously considered due to cost and time-to-market considerations," Erse said. "Our task then was to find a vendor who thoroughly understood our particular business needs and market space, and could support our growth objectives. After months of due diligence Imagine Software emerged as the only vendor that addressed our key concerns: performance, functional capabilities, and cost efficiency."

Elaborating on why Imagine won Nitor's business, Erse remarked: "First, Imagine's real-time performance makes a vital difference in how we approach managing our fund. The ability to launch, for example, a sensitivity or what-if analysis on a single security at any moment provides the intra-day business agility one needs in volatile markets.

"Second, Imagine's ASP-based service—which provides all of the portfolio and risk functions, managed data, and services required for our day-to-day operations—lets us concentrate on managing our assets. Their ASP managed service model not only eliminates our infrastructure and IT resource concerns, it enables us to access any system function at any time, anywhere—even from an airport lounge via a laptop with wireless connectivity.

"The third major factor in our decision was Imagine's wide array of portfolio and risk analytics combined with the ability to add new calculations and modify existing ones without the intervention of a programmer. A powerful yet easy-to-use macro language enables us to customize the way we work with the system—a feature no other system we reviewed supports."

Yvonne Dahl, Director of ASP Sales & Marketing for Imagine, added: "It's exciting for us to mark our entry into the South American market with a fund of Nitor's sophistication. We are pleased that Nitor will rely upon Imagine to support their overall business growth objectives as well as their ability to execute their chosen trading strategies."