Millennium Global, an institutional currency investment manager, has launched a Luxembourg-domiciled Currency Alpha strategy. 

The strategy, which goes live today (15 September), has raised over $100m in pre-launch funding. Millennium will take long and short positions in nine developed market currencies versus the US dollar.

Mark Astley, Co-CEO of Millennium Global, explained he sees currency as an alternative. "Returns generated from currency markets are typically uncorrelated with other asset classes and therefore provide attractive diversification benefits within most investors' asset allocation frameworks," he said.

Astley added one of the reasons for the launch is increasing demand as "mists of understanding currency" have been taken away.

This combined with what Astley sees as an "ideal time" to invest in currencies led the firm to launch the new fund.

He said that as we come out of the pandemic there are "so many differentiating forces, economically, financially and geopolitically, means that countries come out of different rates…and that is an environment for currency markets to exploit".

For investors that come in early, Millennium is offering a discounted management fee of 25 basis points. The standard management fee is 1%.

There will also be a performance fee of 15% above a hurdle rate of 2%.

First published by our sister title Investment Week