The Gargoyle Group is a $500 million investment advisor that manages equity and options strategies. It selected Liquid Holdings' platform to replace its expensive in-house technology and meet institutional standards. Liquid provides a customizable front-end, portfolio accounting, and outsourced data and infrastructure services. This is expected to reduce Gargoyle's costs by 25-50% while improving reporting and passing due diligence requirements.

1. www.liquidholdings.com
THE GARGOYLE GROUP
Aligning Experience & Modern Technology to Grow Assets
©2015 Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
Type: Registered Investment Advisor managing two hedge funds, a mutual fund
and several institutional managed accounts
Strategies: Long U.S. equity and/or short index call option overlay
AUM/AUA: $500 million
Experience: 19 years in business
SOLUTION
• Single platform to manage equity and options strategies from trade inception to reporting;
• Custom-built front-end to manage options overlay strategies in real-time; and
• Outsourced T+1 reconciliation processes and maintenance of trade database for
portfolio accounting reporting.
CHALLENGES
• Existing technology infrastructure expensive to operate, maintain and support;
• Desire to implement robust commercially-available technology solution to meet
institutional investor standards; and
• Specialized need for real-time options trading and valuation capabilities.
ROI
• Expected to reduce technology and operations costs by 25-50%;
• Infrastructure passes DDQ with institutional investors; and
• Reduced time to market when launching new accounts/products.
A Case Study from Liquid Holdings Group

2. A Client Case Study:
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Platforms
EQUITY OPTIONS INNOVATOR— BACK IN GROWTH MODE
Nothing succeeds like success. With more than $500
million in assets under management/advisement and
a nineteen-year track record, The Gargoyle Group’s
asset management business is in the midst of another
growth phase and is using modern technology
from Liquid Holdings to facilitate its business
transformation.
Since 1988 Gargoyle has been at the forefront of the
options-trading marketplace and continues to draw
upon its past experience to drive success. “Gargoyle
was an options market maker for twenty-five years—
we ultimately decided to exit the proprietary trading
business in 2013 to focus exclusively on our alternative
investment strategies which date back to 1997,” said
Alan S. MacKenzie Jr., Gargoyle’s COO & CFO. “The
strategies we use today across our hedge funds, mutual
fund, and managed account products are all options-
centric, leveraging the knowledge we acquired over
those years. We have exhibited flexibility by taking our
core area of expertise and redirecting it into another
area of Wall Street that has allowed us to continue to
grow the business.”
Fast forward to today, Gargoyle is the first sub-
advisor on TCW’s newly-formed Alternative Mutual
Fund platform—a move that should help Gargoyle
substantially grow its assets in the future.
2
A Client Case Study
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Holdings’ Platform & Services
©2015 Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN INVESTING
Gargoyle’s investment process was and remains
technology-driven—it takes a fundamental approach
to building diversified stock portfolios. Gargoyle
designed a quantitative stock-ranking process that
imports, analyzes and weights fundamental metrics
on the largest 2,500 U.S. listed equities by market
capitalization. This system generates the buy and
sell signals that are then implemented by the Firm’s
investment team. The resulting equity portfolio(s) are
then hedged with an options-overlay strategy.
Gargoyle originally built and maintained its own
trading infrastructure to protect its unique intellectual
property and give its traders an edge in the market.
Its infrastructure strategy required Gargoyle to staff
development and operations teams to make sure the
business operated without disruption. It was custom-
fit, and worked well, but was very expensive to support.
With the shift in focus to alternative investment
strategies and asset management, Gargoyle also
shifted its infrastructure strategy from building tools
in-house to sourcing third-party technology to reduce
cost and maintain cutting-edge trading tools.
“When you run a proprietary trading firm, you are
not subject to the operational due diligence that
institutional investors put asset managers through,”
said Phillip Martin, Gargoyle’s Chief Technology
Officer. “We learned that the institutions wanted
their underlying managers to use third-party, robust
systems that were actively maintained and supported
by a full-time technology staff.”
INFRASTRUCTURE SHIFT
In 2013, Gargoyle put out several Requests for
Proposal (RFP) to manage the various aspects of its
technology infrastructure, which included finding
an options-focused Execution Management System
(EMS) to replace its homegrown front-end; an Order
Management System (OMS) and trade database;
and portfolio accounting capabilities. Gargoyle’s
management team was confident this infrastructure
shift would help the Firm meet institutional investor
standards, which have grown from a short assessment
of the investment team into a highly quantitative
and detailed analysis of the fund, the risks taken to

3. A Client Case Study:
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Platforms
3
A Client Case Study
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Holdings’ Platform & Services
©2015 Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
achieve performance, and the infrastructure in place
to safeguard assets. Gargoyle examined a range of
technology vendors. The firm selected the Liquid
platform because it addressed requirements across
the different projects through a single cloud-based
solution as well as the standards for ‘institutional
infrastructure’ from its larger investors.
Platform-as-a-Service
As Gargoyle’s stock ranking methodology generates
buy and sell signals, the Liquid platform is used to
initiate and manage its stock orders, as well as to check
P&L and other security and portfolio level analytics.
As important, Liquid boasts a sixty-person technology
team that worked together with Gargoyle to develop
a custom front-end to manage its options strategies.
“Options trading is a big part of our business,” said
Mr. MacKenzie. “Many of the vendors that we looked
at had poor support for valuing and trading options—
the difference with Liquid was its nimbleness to
accommodate custom development work to handle
our options strategies. We often did not have that
choice with other providers.”
Gargoyle’s equity and options strategies are
implemented and managed through Liquid’s front-
end which allows the investment team to continuously
analyze delta-exposures and make adjustments to
holdings throughout the day. This allowed Gargoyle
to de-commission internally built systems and servers,
and re-allocate resources that supported the options-
overlay strategy.
Data-as-a-Service
During the consultative process, the business identified
‘manual workarounds that kept the portfolio data up-
to-date’ as a pain point. Mr. Martin remarked “start-
of-day processes were a big part of what we did each
morning. We downloaded the positions and trades
from our custodians, read trade files from our brokers,
compared the files to the positions in our database,
and finally, addressed any trade breaks. Being able to
outsource that was a big plus.”
Liquid handles a range of services on behalf of
Gargoyle which include reconciling trades and
handling breaks across any number of counterparties
to ensure the integrity of the firm’s portfolio data.
The resulting data is continuously updated and stored
in a secure repository that provides Gargoyle with a
single, accurate source of portfolio data for investing
and reporting purposes.
Connectivity-as-a-Service
As part of the service, Liquid maintains connectivity
between Gargoyle and its counterparties, trading
venues and market data feeds. Liquid eliminates
multiple points of failure and milliseconds of

4. A Client Case Study:
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Platforms
4
A Client Case Study
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Holdings’ Platform & Services
©2015 Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
latency that can at times erode performance. It also
allows Gargoyle to execute and clear trades with the
executing and prime brokers of choice, and update
those relationships as Gargoyle sees fit without
relinquishing any parts of their infrastructure or data.
Connectivity does not stop with the ecosystem of
vendors supporting Gargoyle—connectivity also
extends to its investors. Through Liquid, investors
can now get access to portfolio-related information
which includes fund and account information,
transaction history and performance. It goes a long
way in satisfying the transparency demands of their
latest institutional investors.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Lastly, Gargoyle selected Liquid to maintain its
systems infrastructure in secure data centers in the
U.S., and to automate business continuity and disaster
recovery planning. As an SaaS-delivered platform,
Liquid ensures Gargoyle has access to the latest
platform advances without disruption to their day-to-
day business. It also allows Gargoyle to get access to
and manage its investments at the desk and from a
mobile device. Together, this helps the Firm eliminate
extra time, money and resources to replace hardware
or software, or update parts of their infrastructure to
support new requirements such as mobile access.
Liquid’s combination of modern technology and
services, and access to development resources helped
to assure Gargoyle that the Liquid platform was the
best fit to meet its present-day and future business
requirements.
“From our first meeting, it was clear that a lot of
thought had been put into the design of the Liquid
platform to support a hedge fund’s operations,” said
Mr. MacKenzie. “Combine that with their willingness
to build the additional capabilities that we needed,
we felt very comfortable that we had found the right
partner to meet our trading technology needs.”
PLATFORM AS A SERVICE
accessible through the web and
optimized for mobile devices
DATA AS A SERVICE
data repository; corporate actions;
reconciliation services
CONNECTIVITY AS A-SERVICE
low latency connectivity to
trading venues/counterparties
INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE
business continuity, disaster recovery,
enhancements without client
disruption
MODERN APPROACH TO SERVICING THE BUY-SIDE
PRESENT & FUTURE ROI
Gargoyle is beginning to realize cost savings month
over month by converting variable operations,
systems and IT maintenance costs into a single fixed-
fee for the Liquid platform. In lieu of contracting
with several different technology vendors that could
have cost over $400K per year, Gargoyle relies on
a single vendor to manage its investment workflow
needs for less than $130K per year. In terms of
immediate cost savings to the business, Gargoyle
did not renew a contract with the incumbent EMS
provider, has re-allocated technology and operations
personnel to other projects, and is in the process of
de-commissioning its reconciliation applications and
historical trade database.
Gargoyle is quick to point out that the project’s ROI
will be easier to quantify in 2016, but is confident
this project will save the business upwards of $500K
because of the development and operations staff that
was required to support its internally built systems
and processes.

5. A Client Case Study:
The Gargoyle Group Selects
Liquid Platforms
Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
111 River Street, 12th Floor
Hoboken, NJ 07030
+1 844-GET-LIQD
www.liquidholdings.com
marketing@liquidholdings.com
Liquid Holdings Group is a SaaS provider of investment management solutions to
the buy side. The Liquid platform combines multi-asset order, execution and risk
management with shadow NAV and investor reporting. Liquid goes a step further,
backing its front-office capabilities with managed services to transform manually-
intensive middle-office processes into an automated, seamless experience.
5
CONCLUSION
The common perception of a nineteen year-old asset management firm might be one that’s steeped in
tradition— typically slower moving and at times more deliberate. Conversely, the global financial markets are
more volatile, moving at sub-millisecond speeds. Teamed with Liquid Holdings, Gargoyle Group is taking
advantage of market opportunities through modern technology and services that when combined with their
experience, judgment and investing knowledge, is helping to improve performance and attract more assets.
For a free evaluation of your infrastructure and to test drive modern technology that can help you raise capital
in today’s competitive environment, contact us at marketing@liquidholdings.com.
©2015 Liquid Holdings Group, Inc.
Aside from present and future cost savings, the
business has received qualitative improvements to
the integrity of its portfolio data and the accuracy
of real-time Greeks; its ability to complete strategic
initiatives by using a third-party development team
and the firm’s ability to raise capital from institutional
money managers who expect its sub-advisors to
have institutional infrastructure in place to safe-
guard assets. Mr. MacKenzie later remarked, “we
are confident that when we get to the end result and
are no longer maintaining our own trade-database
and related applications, it will be a very good ROI.
Some of our cost savings are not as tangible—a lot
of the ROI comes from how we have redeployed our
technology and operations teams.”
EMS + OMS COSTS TECH COSTS OPERATIONS COSTSRISK COSTS
$200K
Alternative*
Liquid
*Estimated 3rd party expenses as listed in RFPs to address technology projects
$400K
$600K
$129K
RETURN ON INVESTMENT