Franklin Square Capital Partners has launched the FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund, an unlisted closed-end fund that invests primarily in global credit.
The fund seeks to generate an attractive total return, while also focusing on capital preservation, by investing in loans, bonds and other credit instruments of public and private companies, with a strong focus on the European and US markets.
This marks the fourth fund launched by Franklin Square, which now manages more than USD9bn in assets.
"Our goal at Franklin Square is to provide individual and smaller institutional investors with the same investment access and investor protections that larger institutions demand," says Michael C Forman, chief executive of Franklin Square. "This new fund adds to our stable of endowment-style funds and provides our investors access to what we expect will be high-performing global opportunities."
Among the fund's key investment strategies, FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund will employ an event-driven approach, focusing on companies that it believes are undervalued by the market. The fund intends to take advantage of dislocations that arise in the credit markets resulting from impending corporate events such as mergers, acquisitions or corporate reorganizations. These events can create attractive investment opportunities when the view of the fund's managers differs from that of the general market.
FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund is sub-advised by GSO Capital Partners, the credit platform of Blackstone. Franklin Square and GSO / Blackstone have partnered on three other funds.
"We don't rely on the market to drive the value of a security," says Doug Ostrover, senior managing director of Blackstone and co-founder of GSO, who serves as lead portfolio manager for FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund. "We take an independent and proactive approach, leveraging our global reach to identify events that will unlock value for companies and our investors."
