For the year up to 31/10/2011, all Salus Alpha Funds clearly outperformed global equity markets in a difficult environment.
The Salus Alpha Commodity Arbitrage had a performance of +4.84% for the year to date until , while the US S&P 500 Index lost -0.35%, and the German DAX30 index lost -11.18% in the same period. This is an outperformance against the S&P 500 Index of +5.19% and against the DAX 30 Index of +16.02%.
In such a difficult market environment, this outperformance results from the employment of an active management approach and from the diversification over numerous strategies and substrategies.
The Salus Alpha RN Special Situations had a performance of +3.76% for the month to date.
The Salus Alpha Real Estate had a performance of +1.98% for the month to date. Salus Alpha Real Estate is a single manager single strategy fund, which invests according to Salus Alpha’s proprietary Global Real Estate Model. The fund currently has an exposure of 100% to the Real Estate markets. Salus Alpha Real Estate has been awarded a 5 Star Rating by www.fondsprofessionell.de for its exceptional performance since inception on 21 January 2008. The fund outperformed the EPRA/NAREIT Real Estate Index by +23.14% in this timespan.
The Salus Alpha Event Driven had a performance of +0.72% for the month to date; the Salus Alpha Multi Style had a performance of +0.72% for the month to date; the Salus Alpha Managed Futures had a performance of -0.18% for the month to date; and the Salus Alpha Directional Markets had a performance of -1.00% for the month to date.
The Salus Alpha Equity Hedged had a performance of +3.18% for the year to date until 10/31/2011, outperforming the S&P 500 Index by +3.53%. The Salus Alpha Equity Hedged currently has a 14% exposure to Long Bias, 34% to Market Neutral, 22% to Long Short Variable Bias, and 30% to Short Bias.
The Salus Alpha Commodity Arbitrage had a performance of +4.84% for the year to date until 10/31/2011, outperforming the S&P 500 Index by +5.19%. The fund outperformed the S&P GSCI Index by 2.29%, which booked a gain of 2.55% in the reporting period. The 12 month rolling alpha of Salus Alpha Commodity Arbitrage to the S&P500 is 4% p.a., the 12 month rolling beta is currently -0.1. This implies that in the past 12 months, the Salus Alpha Commodity Arbitrage had a return of 4% due to active management (alpha).
Salus Alpha Commodity Arbitrage tracks the CAX – Commodity Arbitrage Index. The CAX Index covers the performance of arbitrage strategies, which aim to extract consistent market neutral returns from valuation inefficiencies arising among related commodities – like for example Brent Crude vs. WTI Light Sweet Crude – or among different maturities of futures contracts on one commodity due to Contango, Backwardation and Seasonality.
Contango denotes a market situation where longer-dated commodity futures are priced higher than shorter-dated commodity futures. Markets in contango are characterised by low demand relative to available supply. In these markets, investors holding a long position suffer a roll loss when selling expiring contracts at low prices, and buying new contracts as higher prices. The CAX Index currently has a 10.00% spread position in Wheat, which is currently 24.70% p.a. contangoed.
