Sequoia Capital Fund Management (SCFM), a systematic manager in foreign exchange, has passed USD100 million in assets under management.
Douglas Garistina (pictured), chief executive and chief investment officer of SCFM, says: “We are very pleased to have received a significant capital allocation from a large institutional client that takes our business to the next level. One of the key drivers for this investment is the orthogonal returns our strategy provides to their portfolio. This subscription also highlights to larger investors in systematic strategies that we are able to accept bigger tickets now and that we provide an institutional-grade service.
“Since the early days of running Sequoia Capital Fund Management, we have had some large institutions monitoring us but unable to engage further until we reached a certain minimum scale. The new capital opens the door to this next tier of investors. We look forward to committing our increasing resources to growth and further developing our suite of uncorrelated systematic strategies for the quantitative investor community.”
Hakan Malmros, chief operating officer of SCFM, adds: “This is great news for the entire team and is very encouraging for our continuous efforts on enhancing the capabilities and capacity of the strategy and our business.”
Expectations for further growth at the firm have been raised by a return to a more tractable market environment in major currencies. The FX markets in the lead up to the EU-referendum vote in the UK were a dysfunctional mix of relative illiquidity, sclerosis and jumpiness.
Since the vote for Brexit, SCFM has produced positive returns, up 4.5 per cent over the last two months after a challenging start to the year. In 2015, SCFM’s FX strategy returned 13 per cent (net of fees) on an 11 per cent volatility.
