01/02/2012 Author: Elana Margulies

GCI opens multi-strategy fund to outside investors

GCI Investment Management Singapore, which has a group-level AuM of $760m, has launched its global multi-strategy offering, the Aleutian Fund, to outside investors after it debuted internally in September, HFMWeek has learned.

The fund rolled out with $44m, from both internal capital and a seed investment from a corporate pension, revealed an employee under the condition of anonymity.

The Aleutian Fund employs the same strategy as the firm’s Japan-focused multi-strategy offering, launched in April 2009, which analyses corporate capital structures together with the business fundamentals of a corporation to identify pockets of market inefficiency. In addition, it places emphasis on analysing the macro economy and the increasingly important regulatory environment.

“In addition to intensive research and well-thought-out views on the market, the edge of the fund lies in identifying investment opportunities across various securities under various dimensions of risk,” the employee stated. “In current markets, there are a wide array of securities associated with a single corporation but few people are able to analyse these products with consistent logic.”

Currently, the fund has $64m and is aiming to grow to over $1bn over the next few years. Naruhisa Nakagawa is the fund’s portfolio manager. Prior to GCI, he was the director of proprietary trading focused on equity, equity derivatives, credit and credit derivatives at Merrill Lynch from 2003 to 2008.

The Aleutian Fund returned 6.4% since inception through the third week of January, according to the GCI employee. Meanwhile, the firm’s Japan offering, which currently has $189m under management, returned 66.2% since its April 2009 inception through the first week of January. Goldman Sachs and UBS are the prime brokers.