By Susan Barreto, Editor, AlternativesWatch.com
There is no time like the present to invest hedge funds, according to abrdn’s Russell Barlow, whose team recently launched a new fund platform in the space this summer.
While many have sought out private equity strategies as a long-term investment approach or have simply leaned on long-only products in recent years, in Barlow’s opinion they are missing out on the flexibility that hedge funds offer.
“Hedge funds can invest long, short, use derivatives, leverage, can invest very short term, long term and can place relative value bets,” said Barlow, global head of alternatives at abrdn. “It’s a powerful model.”
In partnership with HFR, abrdn launched last month the Eclipse fund platform as a way to offer passive exposure to hedge fund strategies by tracking indices from HFR. HFR is a well-known firm that has created an investable hedge fund benchmark, the HFRI 500, which tracks hundreds of hedge funds.
HFR has long sought the creation of “passive” exposure to hedge funds, but only now will abrdn’s global clients actually have the ability to have a portfolio that tracks the HFRI 500 as well as other variations of HFR’s benchmark indices. Eclipse also includes exposures to eight sub-strategy indices, including Long/Short Equity, Equity Market Neutral, Merger Arbitrage, Event Driven Multi-Strategy, Discretionary Macro, Systematic Macro, Fixed Income Relative Value and Volatility Relative Value strategies.
Allocating to hundreds of individual hedge funds to track the HFRI 500 can be a daunting exercise for allocators to consider, however, abrdn’s ability to put money to work across such a wide swath of strategies all traces back to having the technology to get the ‘heavy lifting’ done......
