Pension fund risk manager of the year: PKA

Danish fund makes the case for a new breed of patient, unleveraged arbitrageur - capitalising on structural dislocations in equity repo rates, volatility and basis swaps

The team (L-R): Jannik Teigen Hjelmsted, Lea Vibeke Nielsen, Nils Ladefoged, Lene Rasmussen, =Hugo Groos, Claus Jorgensen and Line Vestergaard

Banks and hedge funds are the traditional arbitrageurs in derivatives markets, but both have taken a step back in the past year – banks because the Volcker rule requires them to shut down the proprietary trading desks that used to run these strategies, and hedge funds because arbitrage generally requires a lot of leverage to be profitable, and financing is now harder to come by and more expensive.

The result is that anomalies, when they occur, can become big, because there is no wave of