03 June 2020
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Janus Henderson Investors (JHI) has launched a global multi-asset UCITS strategy to be run by David Elms and Stephen Cain, Investment Week, International Investment's sister title, has revealed.
The Janus Henderson Global Multi-Strategy fund will invest in a diversified portfolio of alternative assets and use portfolio protection strategies to help minimise risk, JHI said.
The fund will draw upon the firm's "heritage and experience in multi-strategy investing". JHI manages $11.6bn (£9.1bn) in assets globally and the new fund will be managed out of both the company's London (Elms) and Denver (Cain) offices.
The strategy is currently managed as a Cayman Islands-domiciled hedge fund. It will now be available in a UCITS structure to both retail and institutional investors throughout Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America."
It will invest across six strategies: convertible arbitrage, event driven, equity market neutral, price pressure, risk transfer, and portfolio protection.
Respectively, these aim to capitalise on mispricing of convertible bonds; exploit pricing inefficiencies around corporate events or capital structures; deliver alpha by investing long and short across pan-European equities; generate returns through the provision of capital to liquidity opportunities; capitalise on supply/demand-driven imbalances in the derivatives market; and mitigate left tail risk through a multi-faceted protection strategy.
Portfolio manager David Elms said that diversification tended to work well in up markets, but becomes unreliable in down markets when investor panic and liquidation induces correlation and all risk assets fall in a synchronised manner.
"We address this issue by running a diversified set of protection strategies that aim to provide positive returns in down markets and are the mirror image of the diversified ‘risk on' strategies we use to generate returns in normal markets," he explained.
Head of EMEA intermediary and LatAm Ignacio de la Maza said JHI had seen an increased appetite from clients for products in the diversified alternative asset class, "as they seek a wider range of performance drivers in their portfolios".
"This fund pulls upon our experience and expertise across the business, investing through a broad toolbox of strategies to give our experienced management team the flexibility and ability to take advantage of opportunities through different market cycles while mitigating risk exposure during volatile markets," de la Maza continued.
The strategy is currently managed as a Cayman Islands-domiciled hedge fund. It will now be available in a UCITS structure to both retail and institutional investors throughout Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
It will aim to deliver positive absolute returns, regardless of market conditions, over any 12-month period. It has an outperformance target of cash +7% per annum, before the deduction of charges, over any 3-year period, with volatility of between 4% and 8%.
The clean retail ‘H' share class will carry a 1% annual management charge alongside a 20% performance fee.
