Investment firm IM Global Partner has said that it has teamed up with Dynamic Beta Investments (DBI) to launch a Ucits fund to be known as the IMGP Managed Futures Fund.
The aim of the fund, the firms said in a joint statement, is to enable European investors to access the increasingly popular managed futures market. DBI, the companies said, has been appointed sub-manager of the fund.
Andrew Beer, co-portfolio manager of the fund at DBI, said: “Managed futures, as a strategy, has the potential for great diversification, especially in an inflationary environment. In 2015, we set out to solve the twin hurdles of investing in the space: high fees and expenses as well as single manager risk. Our managed futures vehicle is the culmination of that effort.”
The fund seeks to match the core factor exposures of the targeted hedge funds with a dynamically adjusted portfolio of liquid futures contracts.
The IMGP DBI Managed Futures fund does not invest directly in hedge funds. Rather, DBI uses quantitative models to estimate the current factor weights of the targeted hedge funds and invests in index futures to seek to obtain similar exposures. The portfolio is rebalanced weekly.
The two companies have a long history together. After being founded in New York 10 years ago, DBI saw a non-controlling stake purchased in it by IM Global Partner in 2018. By the end of October, DBI claims to have had more than $2.1bn in AUM. Its core business is done through three strategies that it says seek to replicate the pre-fee performance of portfolios of hedge funds in the Managed Futures, Equity Long/Short and Multi-Strategy (Equity Long/Short, Relative Value and Event-Driven) categories.
Jamie Hammond, deputy CEO and head of international distribution at IM Global Partner, commented: “The success of our US domiciled ETF strategy (DBMF) has led to European clients asking if we are planning to launch a Ucits version and this is it. Clients have seen the diversification benefits of including managed futures within their portfolios, and we have now made this available in a daily-priced Ucits structure.”
