Tokyo-based Finnowave Investments is gearing up to win new mandates from local pensions following the award of a discretionary investment manager licence from Japan’s FSA last month. It is the latest in an ever-growing number of Japanese hedge funds looking to strengthen their onshore capabilities as pension funds begin to boost their allocations in alternative investments. Finnowave has targeted a fourfold increase in AUM to USD1.2 billion within two years. “Pension funds are after simple-to-understand strategies like long-short funds that profit from buying good stocks and selling bad stocks,” President of Finnowave, Hideki Wakabayashi, was quoted in Bloomberg as saying. The firm’s JPY 20 billion flagship fund, up 2.5 percent this year, has capacity to reach JPY 60 billion before closing it to new investors.