Janus Henderson Investors announced today the launch of a global multi-strategy fund investing in diversified alternative assets.
The fund, dubbed Janus Henderson Global Multi-Strategy Fund, is managed by David Elms and Stephen Cain, based in London and Denver respectively. It will draw upon Janus Henderson’s heritage and experience in multi-strategy investing, with the team managing over $11.6bn (USD) in assets globally.
Available in a UCITS structure, the fund will be sold in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America to wholesale retail and institutional investors. It will also be available in an Australian managed investment scheme structure as a directly invested feeder fund into the UCITS. The strategy is currently managed as a hedge fund domiciled in the Cayman Islands and today’s launch makes the strategy more accessible to investors across the world.
The fund offers investors diversified exposure to alternative assets, while seeking to minimise risk through separate portfolio protection strategies.
The fund invests in a range of asset classes including: equities, fixed income, their associated derivatives and commodities. The fund also uses a portfolio protection strategy, which seeks to generate uncorrelated positive returns during periods of market stress and enables the other strategies to weather short-term market stresses.
It aims to deliver positive absolute returns, regardless of market conditions, over any 12-month period, and has an outperformance target of cash plus 7 percent per annum, before the deduction of charges, over any 3-year period, with volatility of 4-8 percent.
Mr Elms, portfolio manager, commented: “Diversification works well in up markets but is unreliable in down markets, like March 2020, when investor panic and liquidation induces correlation and all risk assets fall in a synchronised manner. We address this issue by running a diversified set of protection strategies that aim to provide positive returns in down markets and are the mirror image of the diversified “risk on” strategies we use to generate returns in normal markets.”
