Jeremy Touboul, a former fund manager at H2O Asset Management, and Raphaël Remond, former CEO of State Street France, have launched LIOR Global Partners, a new sustainability-focused discretionary global macro hedge fund firm.
LIOR Global Partners will use a top-down research process to identify a mix of directional, relative value and thematic investment opportunities across a mix of credit, equities, sovereign bonds and currencies, investing both long and short to generate absolute returns regardless of market environment.
The portfolio-building process brings together macroeconomic research, valuation metrics, technical indicators and quantitative tools, fusing quantitative models with human analysis.
Jeremy Touboul, co-founder and CIO, said the fundamentals behind global macro are “as relevant as ever”, adding there is a strong demand for an approach that integrates ESG (environment, social and governance) investing.
A top decile performer in global macro strategies, Touboul has more than 20 years’ fund management experience, and was most recently at H2O Asset Management, the discretionary macro hedge fund firm founded by Bruno Crastes and Vincent Chailley.
“Covid created a bigger inflection point in a market that was already witnessing economic and market fragility, and as we look forward global macro has a strong role to play in delivering positive returns with contained volatility,” Touboul explained, noting early investor sentiment for the strategy had been positive.
“By incorporating ESG into the investment process we can reduce investment risk over time and hopefully lead the way in how global macro can evolve and contribute towards positive change over the coming years.”
The ESG approach uses Sustainalytics data, which assesses sovereigns and corporates and overlays these with further exclusions including coal, tobacco and controversial weapons, with the aim of outperforming the ESG score of the fund’s dynamic strategic asset allocation.
Co-founder and COO Raphaël Remond, a former CEO of State Street in France with 30 years’ experience in operations, risk and compliance, said the “core of the business” at LIOR is an equal emphasis on both risk management and performance, a systematic approach to ESG, together with a commitment to distributing 10 per cent of net profits to charity each year.
Together with Pierre-Jean Rouleau, most recently head of macro trading for Pictet Group Americas, and Gad Moyal, a quant fund manager with expertise gained at Edmond de Rothschild AM and Société Générale CIB, the founding members of the investment team have worked together in different capacities over the last 15 years.
In the UK, Nimrod Capital is acting corporate and strategic adviser, while James Alpha Management is acting as strategic adviser on capital raising and growth initiatives in the US.
