GAM has launched GAM Star Absolute EuroSystematic, an absolute return fund that uses the Ucits III framework to offer retail clients access to a strategy involving long and short investmen
GAM has launched GAM Star Absolute EuroSystematic, an absolute return fund that uses the Ucits III framework to offer retail clients access to a strategy involving long and short investments across European markets.
The fund will be run by GAM investment director Ross Hollyman and his team. He says: ‘Exploitable investment opportunities arise because investors tend to extrapolate recent historic growth and return patterns – good or bad – too far into the future.
‘However, powerful economic forces generate mean reversion, causing trends to end more rapidly than the consensus expects. To identify these opportunities we have developed a distinctive, value-driven investment process based on quantitative techniques.’
Hollyman, who is responsible for UK and European equity mandates, heads a team of four specialists managing equity long-only and long/short strategies. Before joining GAM in 2003, he was a senior portfolio manager with JP Morgan Fleming Asset Management, where he managed UK and European balanced and performance mandates.
According to GAM, Hollyman has an excellent track record in the use of systematic techniques in portfolio management. His team screens around 3,000 European stocks with market capitalisations typically exceeding EUR450m according to three factors, value, earnings quality and momentum.
The results of this screening create a buy list for the long portfolio and a sell list for the short portfolio. Typically GAM Star Absolute EuroSystematic will hold between 100 and 150 of both long and short positions.
‘Ross Hollyman and his team have extensive experience in alpha generation from identifying and managing long/short positions in their offshore funds,’ says GAM client director Martin Harrison. ‘However, unlike an offshore hedge fund, GAM Star Absolute EuroSystematic has daily dealing and provides all the benefits associated with a regulated vehicle.’
GAM is an active investment management firm with a strong focus on alternative strategies, offering funds of hedge funds, single manager funds and managed portfolios to institutions, intermediaries, charities and private clients. Since its establishment by Gilbert de Botton in 1983 GAM, now owned by Swiss wealth manager Julius Baer, has increased its assets under management to CHF85.8bn at the end of last year.
