Heptagon Capital has successfully completed the conversion of the Helicon Fund from an equity-hedge product to a global long-only equity by removing the index futures hedging overlay. The change is in response to client demand
Launched as the second product on Heptagon’s Irish UCITS platform in April 2011, the Helicon Fund now has an established four-year track record. The Fund has been managed in-house by two seasoned professionals with over thirty years of combined market experience in equities. Helicon’s focus has been on investing in a concentrated portfolio of high-quality equities with exposure to attractive long-term themes. These include growth in robotics, the data deluge and the expanding obesity challenge.
Eran Ben-Zour, a Partner at Heptagon Capital, says: “The returns delivered by the Fund’s managers have been compelling and against a background of strong investor interest, we have taken the decision to convert the Fund to a long-only equity product. We are experiencing a strong investor demand for a plain vanilla version that just focuses on global equity names without trying to mute market volatility through a derivatives overlay. We believe that the strategy of the Helicon Fund constitutes a clearly differentiated offering, complementing the other preeminent managers on our rapidly expanding UCITS platform.”
The underlying performance of the long-only equity product has been fully certified by the auditors Grant Thornton. Since the inception of Helicon in April 2011, through to the end of March 2015, annualised returns for Helicon have been 8.4 per cent, comfortably ahead of comparable returns of 7.7 per cent from the MSCI All-Country World Index. During 2011, 2012 and 2013, Helicon outperformed this benchmark; it is also outperforming year-to-date.
The Helicon Fund is managed by Alexander Gunz and Arnaud Gandon. Alex joined Heptagon in January 2011, having previously worked as a top-ranked equity research analyst at firms including Credit Suisse and JP Morgan. Chief Investment Officer, Arnaud Gandon, served formerly as the Head of Global Equities at UBP where he managed over USD400 million of assets with an audited five-year track record of over 11 per cent annualised returns with circa 10 per cent volatility.
