PARTNER CONTENT
Frederic Guibaud began his finance career in the late 1990s. Over the years, he has held roles as a banker, real estate analyst, and country head of Switzerland for DPAM. In 2016, he co-founded AlphaBee Invest SA, followed by AlphaBee Asset Management Fund in 2017, where he now serves as Director. With 2025 off to a turbulent start, Guibaud shares his take on the market.
What market trends are you particularly excited about right now?
We’re always looking for liquid alpha opportunities, typically in overlooked niches of financial markets. For example, we’ve invested with a low-net long short specialist in liquid upstream energy companies in North America.
While everybody is focused on energy transition, only relatively few analysts are specialised in fossil fuels – creating alpha opportunity.
Irrespective of market regimes or overlooked sectors, we tend to like more volatility in financial markets.
When there is more volatility, the opportunity set of the underlying manager will increase, ceteris paribus. There will be more dispersion in asset prices, and thus they will have more opportunities to place their bets.
What is the biggest source of alpha in your portfolio?
The biggest source of alpha comes from managers who can better analyse markets and exploit inefficiencies – that’s one leg.
Another leg is traders who can trade efficiently around positions – like in the natural gas market. Many market participants look at supply, demand, weather, storage, and LNG transportation, but nimble trading based on these fundamental insights is a different skill. Some are great at it, others are not.
The third leg is cost. Hedge funds can be expensive, in particular multi-strategy funds which can take up to 60% or even more of achieved performance. We don’t invest in such funds. Rather, we focus on investing early and thus, are able to get access to founders’ share classes, which come with lower fees – like paying a 10% performance fee instead of 20%.
Over time, if the hedge fund strategy is successful, that can make a big difference in returns. Key is to distinguish between those early-stage managers which will be able to generate sustainable alpha and those that are best avoided. In other words, don’t invest early with a manager just for the sake of investing early.
Our research shows liquidity issues and geopolitical uncertainty are top concerns for fund managers in 2025. Do you share these concerns?
Geopolitical concerns – to say the least. One example is US president Trump’s policies and remarks which will continue to stir up a lot of volatility.
Liquidity is indeed a concern. Since starting AlphaBee, we’ve only invested in liquid strategies. Liquidity on financial markets is like oxygen – taken for granted until it disappears. When it does, investors have a big problem – immediately. We never want to find ourselves trapped in such a low-liquidity scenario.
Multi-strats, often highly leveraged and holding similar positions, can worsen liquidity issues. For example, in the case of market liquidations, what can happen is that everyone is rushing for the same exit – the only way out is finding someone willing to come in by way of a bid. In the extreme case, that’s when a liquidity death spiral can occur.
 Is there anything you would never invest in?
In our current mandate, we would never invest in anything that is or could become illiquid, such as any form of credit, private debt, trade finance, private equity type of structures, cat bonds, or crypto.
We also analyse hedge fund strategies quantitatively and qualitatively to determine if those strategies could have negative fat tails or a negative skew in their distribution of expected returns. Such strategies are best avoided or only invested sparsely in a portfolio context.
Is ESG in fund management dead?
It is very important, but you have to implement it the right way. Not just ESG for ESG’s sake, or ideological reasons, but rather considering practical implementations. For example, governance is a key focus for us. It’s one of the main pillars of our operational due diligence on underlying funds, but we also look at environmental and social issues.
AlphaBee Asset Management is a regulated investment company, managing regulated Luxembourg Sicà v-SIFs investable for institutional, professional and other well-informed investors. Its philosophy is to protect, diversify and grow capital through controlled volatility, constant high liquidity and efficient diversification while providing attractive risk-adjusted returns. AlphaBee identifies, analyses and invests into global liquid arbitrage and relative value strategies uncorrelated among themselves. With such strategies, AlphaBee constructs and actively manages robust, liquid multi-asset portfolios uncorrelated to global stocks and bond markets.
