Finisterre Capital, the long/short emerging market total return specialist, has launched the Finisterre Equity Fund. Joint Portfolio Managers of the new fund are Alistair Candlish and Edward Cole, who joined Finisterre in August, 2011. The duo was hired as a team from Newsmith, where they were partners in the firm and jointly ran Newsmith’s EM equity fund.
Finisterre’s new fund is a global emerging market equity strategy that seeks to maximise absolute returns within a framework of reduced volatility relative to the market and peers. The fund employs a top-down macro process that seeks to gauge and predict changes in momentum in the global business cycle, and selects stocks accordingly. The fund invests long and short in equity securities, and uses options and swaps to hedge at a portfolio level.
Finisterre has a nine-year track record of successfully trading various emerging market asset classes on a long/short basis. This emerging market expertise has been extended for the first time to a dedicated equity strategy, which will benefit from a shared investment approach as well as an established risk management team.
The Finisterre Equity Fund has been trading since November last year with USD25m of seed capital. In addition to this, the portfolio managers are managing a substantial equity allocation within the USD800m Finisterre Global Opportunity Fund.
Finisterre Capital is planning to open the Equity Fund to outside investors in the second quarter of this year.
“There has been growing investor demand for a Finisterre equity fund,” says Paul Crean, co-founder and CIO of Finisterre Capital. “The new fund nicely complements our existing emerging markets offerings, and rounds out our EM product range. In addition, we were very fortunate to attract experienced professionals like Alistair and Edward to manage it.”
“There are big benefits for Alistair and I in being part of a dedicated emerging market specialist like Finisterre,” says Cole. “Working alongside other experienced EM specialists investing across EM assets has been highly additive to our process.”
The Finisterre Equity Fund has a target return of 15-20% net annualised over the business cycle, with a target volatility of 10-13%. Minimum investment is USD1 million.
