Castle Harbour Securities has appointed Damien Regnier, previously portfolio manager for global convertible bonds at Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, to co-manage a new global convertible bond fund.
Castle Harbour plans to launch the R&D – Pure Global Convertibles Fund in Q4 2014 and is to seed the fund with EUR200 million.
Regnier managed the Morningstar 5-star rated DWS Invest Convertibles fund, now renamed Deutsche Invest I Convertibles fund, which was in the top two per cent of its Bloomberg peer group for year-to-date performance.
He will adopt the same "pure" non-benchmarked, investment-grade strategy focused on institutional investors that he developed at DeAWM.
The fund grew by more than EUR2 billion over the last three years with an average net return of 9.46 per cent per annum. It peaked as one of the world's largest convertible bond funds at EUR2.8 billion in September 2014 before he left.
Faye Fouladi, managing partner, Castle Harbour Securities, says: “Damien’s appointment to co-manage our new convertible bond fund is an important step in Castle Harbour’s development as we look to complement our advisory and execution services with a high-quality asset management operation.
“Damien has earned the trust and respect of his clients over a long period of outperformance and we look forward to helping him take this to the next level at Castle Harbour.”
Regnier says: “Castle Harbour has been prescient in creating a platform for staff that genuinely supports their capabilities which, in turn, delivers strong risk-managed returns for clients.
“The timing of this move and the launch of a new convertible bond fund is good – liquidity is back, US interest rates are expected to slowly increase and the secondary converts market is quite cheap because of primary market activity, such as Twitter and Red Hat, as well as recent price correction.”
Before joining DeAWM in 2010, Damien was a convertible bond trader at JP Morgan's Investment Bank before becoming head of long-only convertible bonds at Vega-Chi Ltd.
Regnier has also managed the ING Direct Arancio Convertibile fund, the DWS High-Yield Global CB fund as well as other segregated convertible bonds strategies.
