Alternative Investment Products and Services
Hedge Fund Strategies
The Company's hedge fund strategies are focused on addressing the needs of institutional
investors and high net worth individuals to preserve and grow allocated capital.
The Company and its affiliates manage a number of single strategy vehicles,
including merger arbitrage, activism and global macro. The Company and its affiliates
also manage certain multi-strategy hedge funds that are currently in wind-down.
The majority of assets remaining in these funds include private investments
in public companies, investments in private companies, real estate investments
and special situations.
Alternative Solutions
The Company's alternative solutions business offers a range of customized hedge
fund investment and advisory solutions, including customized and commingled
fund of funds, hedge fund replication, liquid alternative risk premia products,
and customized solutions to a global institutional client base. The Company's
alternative solutions business also develops and manages customized investment
portfolios, which may include a combination of direct hedge fund investments,
liquid alternative risk premia products and hedging overlays.
Ramius Trading Strategies
The Company’s managed futures fund business serves as investment adviser
to various commodity pools including the State Street/Ramius Managed Futures
Strategy Fund, a mutual fund advised by Ramius Trading Strategies LLC and sub-advised
by SSgA Funds Management Inc. (an affiliate of State Street Global Advisors),
that offers U.S. investors access to a multi-manager strategy that seeks to
capture returns tied to a combination of global macroeconomic trends in the
commodity futures and financial futures markets and interest income and capital
appreciation. The mutual fund is sub-advised by SSgA Funds Management Inc. and
seeks to offer investors access to returns with low correlation to the public
equity and debt markets by allocating capital to various third party commodity
trading advisors that pursue a managed futures strategy in a managed account
format.
Real Estate
The Company's real estate business focuses on generating attractive, risk adjusted
returns by using our owner/manager approach to underwriting, structuring, financing
and redevelopment of all real estate property types since 1999. This approach
emphasizes a focus on real estate fundamentals and potential market inefficiencies.
The RCG Longview platform provides senior bridge loans, subordinated mortgages,
mezzanine loans, and preferred equity through its debt fund series, and makes
equity investments through its equity funds.
HealthCare Royalty Partners ("HRP")
The Company’s healthcare royalties business invests principally in commercial-stage
biopharmaceutical products and companies through the purchase of royalty or
synthetic royalty interests and structured debt and equity instruments (through
the funds managed by HRP (the "HRP Funds")). The HRP Funds seek these
royalty interests in end-user sales of commercial-stage or near commercial-stage
medical products such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology products and medical
devices. We share the net management fees from the HRP Funds equally with the
founders of the HRP Funds. In addition, we have interests in the general partners
of the HRP Funds ranging from 25% to 40.2%.
Broker-Dealer Business
Investment Banking
Our investment banking professionals are focused on providing strategic advisory
and capital raising services to U.S. and international public and private companies
in our Target Sectors. By focusing on our Target Sectors over a long period
of time, we have developed a significant understanding of the unique challenges
and demands with respect to public and private capital raising and strategic
advice in these sectors. Our advisory and capital raising capabilities begin
at the early stages of a private company's accelerated growth phase and continue
through its evolution as a public company. Our advisory business focuses on
mergers and acquisitions, including providing fairness opinions and providing
advice on other strategic transactions. Our capital markets capabilities include
equity, including private investments in public equity and registered direct
offerings, credit and fixed income, including public and private debt placements,
exchange offers, consent solicitations and tender offers, as well as origination
and distribution capabilities for convertible securities. We have a unified
capital markets group which we believe allows us to be effective in providing
cohesive solutions for our clients. Historically, a significant majority of
our investment banking revenue has been earned from high-growth small and mid-capitalization
companies. The Company, from time to time, may invest in private capital raising
transactions of its clients.
Brokerage
Our team of brokerage professionals serves institutional investor clients in
the United States and internationally. We trade common stocks, listed options
and equity-linked securities on behalf of our clients and offer a full-service
suite of introduced prime brokerage services targeting emerging hedge fund managers.
We also provide our clients with an electronic execution suite. We provide global,
multi-asset class algorithmic execution trading models to both buy side and
sell side clients and also offer execution capabilities relating to these trading
models through ATM Execution LLC ("ATM Execution"). In addition, through
January 2015, we engaged in the securities lending business through Cowen Equity
Finance LP ("Cowen Equity Finance"). We have relationships with over
1,000 institutional investor clients. Our brokerage team is comprised of experienced
professionals dedicated to our Target Sectors, which allows us to develop a
level of knowledge and focus that we believe differentiates our brokerage capabilities
from those of many of our competitors. We tailor our account coverage to the
unique needs of our clients. We believe that our sector traders are able to
provide superior execution because of their knowledge of the interests of our
institutional investor clients in specific companies in our Target Sectors.
Our sales professionals also provide our institutional investor clients with
access to the management of our investment banking clients outside the context
of financing transactions. These meetings are commonly referred to as non-deal
road shows. Non-deal road shows allow our investment banking clients to increase
their visibility within the institutional investor community while providing
our institutional investor clients with the opportunity to further educate themselves
on companies and industries through meetings with management. We believe our
deep relationships with company management teams and our sector-focused approach
provide us with broad access to management for the benefit of our institutional
investor and investment banking clients.