Man's RMF fund invests in Hong Kong's Minerva Macro Fund

Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Author: HedgeWeek

Man Investments' seeding fund, RMF Global Emerging Managers, has completed its second incubation deal of the last two months, providing a cornerstone investment of USD50m for Hong Kong's Minerva Macro Fund.

In July RMF GEM invested USD50m in the flagship product of 5:15 Capital Management, an unrelated fixed income arbitrage manager based in Connecticut.

Minerva is managed by Stanley Ku, who founded the Hong Kong office of Fortress Investment Group and most recently managed USD750m for Fortress' Drawbridge Global Macro Fund. Dorothy Lau, Minerva's risk and business manager, formerly worked for JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

'Stanley Ku's work at Fortress and Goldman Sachs has made him a very well respected money manager in Asia,' says Hans Hurschler, head of Man Investments' Hedge Fund Ventures. 'But we are also enthusiastic about investing in this fund early in its development because Minerva invests in the kind of highly liquid assets that are especially appealing to investors following last year's problems with gating and side pockets. We believe that Minerva has the potential to generate solid, stable returns and that it may attract substantial assets.'

Minerva is a discretionary global macro fund, focused on Asia. It trades only highly liquid instruments such as interest rate or bond futures, foreign exchange forwards and equity index futures or sector ETFs. The entire portfolio is designed to be liquidated in 48 hours.

RMF GEM typically makes four or five investments with emerging managers each year. The fund invests in underlying hedge funds rather than the investment companies that manage them, but it typically also agrees to an arrangement sharing some of the underlying fund's economics.