Rogers Investment Wins $90 Million Hedge-Fund Mandate From Japan Investor

Rogers Investment Advisors K.K., a Tokyo-based fund-of-hedge-funds adviser, said it won a mandate worth about $90 million from a Japanese institutional investor, adding to signs of recovery in the nation’s hedge-fund industry.

The allocation will be made on Aug. 1, bringing the firm’s advisory assets under management to $130 million, Ed Rogers, chief executive officer, said in a telephone interview today. The money is coming from a Japanese foreign investment trust distributed by one of the largest Japanese financial institutions and is part of a closed-end fund ending in 2013, he said, declining to name the investor.

“This is a sign of on-going alpha opportunities in the Japanese hedge-fund space and a result of four years of hard work in building out our business,” said Rogers. “We hope and expect to win more of these mandates going forward.”

Rogers’s Wolver Hill Japan Multi-Strategy Fund, which is a Japan-focused fund of hedge funds, has returned 3.2 percent, net of fees in 2010 through June, according to Rogers. That compares with a 7.3 percent decline by Japan’s benchmark Topix index and a 2.8 percent gain by the Eurekahedge Japan Hedge Fund Index in the same period.

The mandate increase comes as Japanese pension funds plan to boost alternative-investment allocations, including hedge funds. About 37 percent of Japanese pensions surveyed by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s asset management unit said they expect to boost allocations to alternative investments, according to report published by the bank in April.

Hedge funds are private, largely unregulated pools of capital whose managers can buy or sell any assets and participate substantially in profits from money invested.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tomoko Yamazaki in Tokyo at tyamazaki@bloomberg.ne