spread their counterparty risk across several prime brokerages, especially those with strong capital reserves. This trend towards multi-prime brokerage is also not without its problems. From an operational standpoint, it is adding some complexity and hedge funds have to invest in technologies and extra resources to manage the different relationships. Also, from the investors' point of view, the multi-prime brokerage is adding some complexity to the due diligence as it becomes very complicated to perform proper assets reconciliation between the fund's administrator and its counterparties. Fees Prime brokers do not charge a fee for the bundled package of services they provide to hedge funds. Rather, revenues are typically derived from three sources: spreads on financing (including stock loan), trading commissions and fees for the settlement of transactions done away from the prime broker. The financing and lending spreads, which are charged in basis points on the value of client loans (debit balances), client deposits (credit balances), client short sales (short balances), and synthetic financing products such as swaps and CFDs (Contract for difference), make up the vast majority of prime brokerage revenue. Therefore, clients who undertake substantial short selling or leverage represent more lucrative opportunity than clients who do less short selling and/or utilize minimal leverage. Clients whose market activities are principally fixed income-oriented will generally produce less prime brokerage revenue, but may still present significant economic opportunity in the repo, foreign exchange (fx), futures, and flow business areas of the investment bank. Risks Prime Brokers facilitate hedge fund leverage, primarily through loans secured by the long positions of their clients. In this regard, the Prime Broker is exposed to the risk of loss in the event that the value of collateral held as security declines below the loan value, and the client is unable to repay the deficit. Other forms of risk inherent in Prime Brokerage include operational risk and reputational risk. Large prime brokerage firms today typically monitor the risk within client portfolios through house-designed "risk based" margin methodologies that consider the worst case loss of a portfolio based on liquidity, concentration, ownership, macroeconomic, investing strategies, and other risks of the portfolio. These risk scenarios usually involve a defined set of stress test scenarios, rules allowing risk offsets between the theoretical profit and losses (P&Ls) of these stress test scenarios for products of a common underlier, and offsets between groups of theoretical P&Ls based on correlations. Liquidity penalties