Across our 19 years of managing the strategy, we have met hundreds of managers and built a proprietary database covering the main regions and investment strategies. We have elaborated a strict and comprehensive due diligence process that has shown its solidity across market cycles and unexpected events.
Meeting with managers is key to assess the quality and the potential risks of the investment. It is also essential to build a long-term partnership and a solid network.
But excellence in fund-picking alone is not sufficient. We complement our bottom-up approach with a top-down thematic allocation, and we maintain a close focus on underlying risk exposures in the aim to avoid unwanted biases and hidden correlations.
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”Selecting the best managers is not sufficient, we aim to compose the most robust portfolio for each market phase
The universe of possibilities is immense: fundamental and quantitative strategies, long-only and long-short, event driven and risk arbitrage, credit and distressed, macro and fixed income. Besides, within a category or asset class, the style may differ: directional or market neutral, generalist or sector specialist. All will tend to different risk levels, biases and correlations. Across the years we have built a robust proprietary database which references more than 100 funds with all their characteristics.
Analysing numbers is important but we also look beyond them. Identifying the best managers in each strategy starts with understanding their skills, biases, strengths and weaknesses, in order to anticipate how they will behave in various market conditions. Regular in-person meetings, prior to investing and for monitoring purposes, are key to detect future opportunities and to avoid style drifts, overconfidence and stubbornness.
year track record
selection criteria: Competitive advantage, firm culture, factor exposures, cost & structures
Our philosophy consists of investing in a combination of strategies implemented by external specialized managers. We focus on diversification in the aim of providing portfolio resilience in all market phases. Our investment experience and knowledge feed our investment process, and the close relationships we have developed with our underlying managers make the difference.
Our due diligence process is the result of our longstanding experience in fund selection. It includes a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the strategies and in-person meetings, and is complemented by a strict legal and operational review by independent risk teams. At the end of this process, we obtain a basket of 200 eligible funds representing our best selection in each category.
All the strategies we invest in exhibit a specific risk/return profile and play a particular role in the portfolio: relative value fixed income strategies, global macro, equity long-short, quantitative strategies such as volatility arbitrage or trend following... We activate them depending on market conditions and on our convictions. We may also add opportunistic top-down thematic exposure when we have a strong view.
Risk exposures are complex. Unmastered portfolio construction may lead to unwanted risk biases, especially when markets are turbulent. Therefore we keep a close eye on cross-correlations and adjust portfolio exposures along the way, in the aim to preserve the robustness of the portfolio in all market phases.
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