Man GLG has launched a second fund for Asian equities heavyweight Andrew Swan six months after joining the firm from Blackrock.
The $27.3bn (£19.3bn) fund group, which is the discretionary arm of Man Group, announced Swan (pictured) would be launching Man GLG Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) Equity Alternative, a long/short fund.
This is Swan’s second fund launch since becoming Man GLG’s head of Asian equities ex-Japan last August. In October he launched the Man GLG Asia (ex-Japan) Equity fund, a high-conviction, long-only Oeic for UK investors.
Swan, who ran over $25bn in Asian and emerging market equity strategies at Blackrock, is supported by a team of five analysts at Man GLG, including former colleagues Alethea Leung and Anand Agarwal who followed him from Blackrock in September.
His new fund will also follow a “concentrated” approach, holding between 50-100 stocks from across the cap spectrum. The team will aim to capture the turning points in company earnings revisions using a combination of bottom-up analysis and top-down macro views to suss out how countries, sectors, and investment styles will perform in various environments, it said in a press release.
It will be benchmark and style agnostic, which Man GLG said gives the team the freedom to “invest flexibly across the Asia Pacific opportunity set with absolute conviction”.
Relatively limited options for long/short Asian equity funds
Willis Owen head of personal investing Adrian Lowcock said the long/short vehicle will suit Swan’s expertise, noting he has experience managing a range of different strategies across the Asia Pacific region for Blackrock, including hedge funds.
“The research process for creating new investment ideas on traditional long strategies can be easily adapted to identify those businesses to sell,” Lowcock said.
AJ Bell head of active portfolios Ryan Hughes agreed the move made sense given “the heritage of absolute return strategies at Man GLG”. The fact there are “relatively limited options” for long/short Asian equity funds was likely another selling point, he said.
“Given the huge opportunity set in Asia, it should certainly provide a range of investment options for Swan to utilise, although whether investors want this approach or would simply prefer long-only given the long-term growth of the region, only time will tell.”
Swan said there is currently “significant dispersion” in the Asia Pacific region creating a “fertile” hunting ground for long/short strategies.
“The effects of macro policies and local conditions have affected corporate profitability in Asia over the last decade,” Swan said.
“We believe these factors offer opportunities to generate alpha, particularly in a region in which analyst coverage can be inconsistent and there are many under-researched or under-covered stocks.”
See also: Andrew Swan: ‘Don’t invest in Asia simply because it has higher rates of economic growth’
