Ed Butchart, former CIO at Sloane Robinson, has joined Kepler Partners alongside a team of three research analysts.Together the team will continue to be responsible for managing the KLS Emerging Markets Fund, which launched on the Kepler Liquid Strategies Platform in July 2017 and has generated 13.85 per cent annualised returns since inception, including a return of 28.75 per cent in 2020.
The team join Kepler at an exciting time for the business and will be responsible for managing the KLS Emerging Markets Fund that was originally launched in partnership with Sloane Robinson in 2017. The fund invests in global emerging market equities based on the strategy that Ed and his team have managed since 2013; initially as a Cayman fund and then also in UCITS since 2017. Over this period the strategy has annualised over 7.5 per cent vs. the EM index which has returned just 3.4 per cent and with significantly more volatility.
Butchart brings considerable experience with him, having been CIO at Sloane Robinson since 2011, prior to which he had spent five years at Moore Capital and seven years at Merrill Lynch, as well as establishing his own research firm, Gemstrat Advisory. In addition, senior Analysts Rohit Agarwal joins with 16years of experience, including Lansdowne Partners, Pictet Asset Management and JP Morgan. Patrick Christiansen and Andreas Valanides joined Sloane Robinson over four years ago from university and been working directly with Ed since then.
Tom Trotter, Senior Partner and Head of Sales at Kepler Partners, says: “With Sloane Robinsons closing, we are delighted Ed and his team are joining Kepler to continue to manage the KLS Emerging Markets Fund. They are an extremely experienced and credible team who we have enjoyed working with since launching the UCITS fund in 2017. We see this as a core emerging market equity fund and are delighted to continue to offer this strategy to both existing and future prospect investors.”
The strategy is one of few UCITS Emerging Market equity funds with an absolute return objective; the team manage a concentrated portfolio of 30-35 best ideas, following a disciplined and repeatable investment process, which has been developed by Ed since joining Sloane Robinson in 2010.
Butchart says: “Having invested a huge amount of time and effort honing an investment process based on lessons learned from nearly 30 years of investing in Emerging Markets, we are delighted by the continuity offered by joining Tom, Georg and the team at Kepler to continue this work. We think it is a very interesting time for the asset class and are excited about the opportunities we see ahead.”
The fund will be part of Kepler Liquid Strategies ICAV, the UCITS platform established by Kepler Partners in 2016. The Platform currently has five funds and USD980 million in assets under management. The Emerging Markets team is the first strategy Kepler will manage in – house and considerable time has been spent putting the necessary operational infrastructure in place to allow this to happen.
Georg Reutter, Senior Partner and Head of Investments at Kepler Partners, says: “This presents an exciting development in Kepler’s growth as an asset management business and a natural evolution for us to make. We continue to focus on growing our KLS platform and providing best in class UCITS opportunities for allocators.”
