Altana Wealth (Altana), a new investment management group founded by Lee Robinson, one of the co-founders of Trafalgar Asset Managers Ltd, is opening its Altana Sovereign Diversity Fund to external investors.
Altana Wealth was founded to deliver Absolute Real Returns to investors. This is reflected in the fundamental objective of its first fund, which in response to widespread concern in the investment community over currency inflation and devaluation, aims to deliver inflation-adjusted returns.
The Fund seeks to provide diversification benefits to a sovereign portfolio by offering an inflation hedge via avoidance of weak currencies. It gives exposure to harder to access, currently higher yielding sovereigns and is tightly risk-managed with regard to currency, duration, counterparty, and sovereign risk.
The Fund has been seeded with USD25 million of Robinson’s own money, aligning directly management’s interests with those of investors. The Altana team has a strong industry track-record at top tier investment firms and all key management have equity participation in the new Company.
Chief Investment Officer Robinson has over 10 years’ experience of managing hedge funds and overcoming market turmoil. Robinson, who was co-founder of Trafalgar Asset Managers and Portfolio Manager of Trafalgar Catalyst Fund, has one of the best 10 year trading histories in finance making a total of 300% for investors invested throughout that period (with the worst year a loss of 7). Robinson was one of the few Hedge Fund managers who made money in market turmoil such as 2008.
He predicted the banking crisis of 2008 successfully positioning his fund for the downturn and winning the Eurohedge award for fund of the year in his category. He subsequently positioned his own investments to profit from the Sovereign Credit Crisis. He recently put forward his ideas for a market solution for the Euro Crisis and is co-author of the book “The Gathering Storm.”
Robinson says: “The goal within our Sovereign Diversity Fund is to profit from the appreciation of currencies of stronger sovereign credits and to protect investors’ wealth from the stealth defaults of debtor nations. We believe this is a great opportunity for anyone who earns income from or holds wealth in any of the main reserve currencies.
“We achieve this by investing in a diversified portfolio of short-dated sovereign credit instruments, whose currencies are expected to strengthen against the USD and other traditional reserve currencies (GBP, EUR, JPY). Favoured currencies will reflect relative strength in public finances, the domestic financial system and the balance of payments.
“Most importantly we will be avoiding nations at risk of default or restructuring and enhancing returns by taking advantage of short-term currency trends to actively trade around the long-term positions of the portfolio and investing in other instruments such as gold.
“To take advantage of opportunities in global markets it is essential to maintain your real purchasing power. Assets for sale in Europe are arguably still expensive in USD terms though perhaps cheap in EUR terms but a bargain for a Swiss investor. ASDF is the building block of this process.”
Other members of the Altana team include portfolio manager Ian Gunner, who has also held senior research and FX strategy roles at Chase Manhattan, SBC Warburg, ABN Amro and Mellon Financial Corp. Chief Operating Officer Antony Lingard was previously a Managing Director in UBS’ Prime Brokerage department and Chief Technology Officer Neil Panchen has worked as Global Head of Commodities IT and Global Head of FX IT through 2008 at Deutsche Bank, and has implemented the IT infrastructure for the FX Exotics, FX Forwards and Precious Metals businesses.
Altana Wealth has been founded with four key principles to managing money: transparency – after all it’s the investors’ money; application of limits to the size of our funds – we are not scared to close them to outside investors when we believe liquidity limits have been reached; capital preservation and compounding – the ultimate measure of successful investing; and importantly alignment of interests, which is why the management team have invested significant amounts of their own money.
Robinson says: “We apply an owners approach to making money, you get the best liquidity we can achieve, transparency and access to research and Early Warning systems. In fact Altana’s proprietary early warning system allows its investors to be notified when their counterparty credit risk surpasses pre defined levels.”
