Dean Art Investments, a new portfolio management company that will invest in the booming art market, has launched the USD50m Dean Art Fund, the first fund to join the Harbour Capital hedge
Dean Art Investments, a new portfolio management company that will invest in the booming art market, has launched the USD50m Dean Art Fund, the first fund to join the Harbour Capital hedge fund investment management platform.
The Dean Art Fund will use the capital to buy artworks in market sectors with proven historical track records. The fund will seek superior investment returns by assembling a diversified portfolio of works and by exploiting multiple channels for the purchase and sale of art.
The investment consultant for the fund will be Jeremy Eckstein, formerly of Sotheby’s, previously art advisor to the British Rail Pension Fund and an advisor to ABN Amro on fine art funds. David Thomas, a former international banking director at Lloyds TSB Bank, is chairman of Dean Art Investments, while Gérard Moxon, who has 20 years’ experience in the financial markets with Lloyds Bank International and Merrill Lynch International, becomes managing director.
‘The art market is performing strongly, in marked contrast to the world’s stock markets,’ Eckstein says. ‘New sources of demand for good quality art are facing an intrinsically fixed supply and are providing strong support for prices. The correlation between equity markets and art prices has rarely been weaker.’
The Dean Art Fund will be an open-ended, Jersey-based incorporated cell company, a structure that allows individual investors to invest in the general fund or to have their own separate cell portfolios. The fund will also accept artworks as investments on an agreed valuation basis. Individual artworks owned by the fund can be leased to shareholders, institutions, corporations and individuals through a separate leasing company.
‘Harbour Capital is very pleased to announce the launch of the Dean Art Fund,’ says chief executive Steve Williams. ‘Art as an asset class offers investors non-correlation to traditional funds, although the management team intends to use our services to operate the fund as an institutional-grade investment fund, with the infrastructure and regulatory framework adequate to the requirements of modern investors.’
Dean Art Investments is a portfolio art investment manager, set up to benefit from increasing interest in fine art as an asset class. The fund will invest in a broad range of art categories, with an emphasis on Old Masters, Impressionism, post-Impressionism and modern art, avoiding sectors the fund’s managers and advisors believe will underperform the market. Investments in individual works of art are expected to be in a range from GBP500,000 to GBP3m.
Harbour Capital Partners is a London-based full-service hedge fund investment management platform established by a team of industry specialists to offer an institutional-quality operational infrastructure providing higher standards of operational procedure and compliance than would be possible for a small or medium-sized fund operating on its own.
