Athena Investment Systems, a US-based technology provider for the hedge fund industry, has launched Aura, a real-time information dashboard which the firm says provides an inexpensive method of viewing consolidated positions and trade information across multiple prime brokers.

The Aura dashboard extracts and aggregates raw positions and trades from multiple prime brokers as well as from other sources, including fund administrators and systems for accounting, order management and market data. Aura then calculates real-time exposures, risk, P&L and performance at all levels including trade, position, trade pair, strategy and fund.

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, many hedge funds have added a second or even third prime broker as a means of diversifying their vendor risk, but according to Scott Sykowski, principal analyst at Athena, this has created its own problems, with funds having to spend hours each day consolidating different sets of reports.

“With Aura, we return this time to the firm, while also providing managers better actionable information including positions, exposures, risk values, P&L, performance, income bucketing and broker performance information,” he said.

Athena, which is based in Boston, counts hedge funds, mutual funds, banks, insurance companies and institutional managers among its clients.