An ex-Merrill Lynch Investment Management team has re-united to form Dawnay, Day mc2 Capital Management and launch a new global macro fund.

Dawnay, Day mc2 Capital Management is a joint venture between London-based Dawnay, Day International and the management team of Clive Lang, Chris Turner and Munir Hussain.

Lang said: "We have been seeded by Dawnay, Day, and have considerable interest from investors who want to see a 3-6 month track record.  Once we have this track record we hope to be able to bring these investors into the fund as well as soliciting funds from other investors. We believe that the fund has a potential capacity in excess of USD 750 million, subject of course to achieving our performance targets".

The new fund is The Global AdVantage Fund, a Cayman-domiciled, Dublin-listed open ended investment company with a master/feeder structure featuring High Leverage and Low Leverage versions.

Lang said: "Global AdVantage is a global macro fund with an emphasis on comparative value plays. Investment decisions are driven principally by top-down macro-economic and business cycle analyses, with qualitative judgements applied to proprietary quantitative inputs. Risk management is embedded in all aspects of the investment process".

The fund's investment objective is to provide investors with consistent absolute returns averaging 8% - 10% above LIBOR over the long-term.  The fund (Low Leverage) seeks to achieve this through investing and trading in globally diversified portfolios of equities, bonds, currencies and commodities, using a well-developed consistent, repeatable process. A feature of the fund is that it will possess low absolute risk & low correlation to major asset classes.

The High Leverage Fund will be run pari-passu with the Low, at a further x3 gearing i.e. gross exposure up to 1000% of NAV and max net exposure of 360%, seeking returns of 25-30%.

The members of the management team at mc2 and their joint venture partners at Dawnay, Day have extensive experience of managing financial assets and setting up new ventures.  In addition, the management team has many years of experience in hedge funds.

Chris Turner and Clive Lang worked together at MLIM for over four years bringing top down analyses and decision making to a wide range of global investment mandates.  Together they turned around a perennially underperforming international equity fund, took it from the 97th percentile in its published universe to the 8th percentile in just over a year and maintained a strong track record.

Munir Hussain worked with the team for the last three years, focusing on the use of derivatives and trading strategies. Hussain and Lang together developed a series of structured investment products for both retail and institutional clients. Immediately prior to co-founding mc2 Hussain was a long/short equity trader with Mako Century Warwick Fund.

Minimum investment in the new fund is USD 250,000 per Class in the case of USD shares or GBP 250,000 per class in the case of Sterling shares. The prime broker is UBS, fund administrator is PFPC, legal advisors are Simmons & Simmons, and the fund auditors are Deloitte & Touche.