Bob Elliott, a former member of the Investment Committee at Bridgewater Associates, has launched Unlimited Funds, a new investment firm aiming to provide all investors exposure to the alpha-generating potential of alternative investment strategies without the high fees and adverse tax implications.
In conjunction with the launch, the firm announced its first product, the Unlimited HFND Multi-Strategy Return Tracker ETF, which uses a sophisticated machine learning engine to track the gross-of-fees returns across several hedge fund indices.
Elliott, the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Unlimited, has built innovative hedge fund strategies for more than two decades, most recently at Bridgewater Associates, where he developed strategies across asset classes, including many for the firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund. He is joined by Bruce McNevin, Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Unlimited, a Professor of Economics at New York University who has held various data science positions at hedge funds Clinton Group and Midway Group, along with positions at Bank of America and BlackRock.
Hedge fund strategies have historically generated significant alpha, or returns above the relevant benchmark, but that alpha is typically eaten away by high fees and inefficient tax structures. Unlimited believes HFND is built to mitigate those costs, bringing a more sophisticated approach to hedge fund replication than has been employed in an ETF to date.
HFND is an actively managed ETF that will typically hold long and short positions in 30-50 ETFs and exchange-listed futures contracts across asset classes. It will have management fees that are roughly one-quarter of the standard 2 and 20 cost of a typical hedge fund. The strategy will be managed by Elliott and McNevin.
