Sydney-based Instinct Capital, established last year by Frederic Eechaute and Stephen Good and whose Instinct Japan Opportunity Fund has r
Sydney-based Instinct Capital, established last year by Frederic Eechaute and Stephen Good and whose Instinct Japan Opportunity Fund has returned 30.2 per cent through November this year to make it the best performing Japan-focused fund, has said that it plans to close the fund to future investors once it reaches USD200million. The event-driven fund has seen its assets rise from USD10million at inception to approximately USD100million, with Eechaute expectant that this could rise to USD150million by end-March through further allocations from pension funds and endowments. Eechaute told Bloomberg that they’d been seeing a lot of money coming to them and that he expected appetite for Japanese stocks “to recover over the next twelve months”. The reason for limiting the fund’s size to USD200million is to keep it nimble. “We have been No. 1 this year, but we want to be No. 1 next year as well as the following year,” Eechaute told Bloomberg. The fund uses long/short as well as event-driven strategies to generate alpha, principally targeting the top 250 most liquid stocks in the Topix Index of 1,600 companies, with Eechaute adding that “we’re short-term driven and that has allowed us to navigate through the Japanese markets”. Instinct Capital now has a research office in Tokyo and plans to add about five headcount over the next year, with Eechaute himself relocating from Sydney.
