Fund Times: 23 - 27 November

Anthony Bolton to return to fund management; SWIP adds to Bond team; Gartmore re-open Roger Guy’s European Absolute Return fund; Thames River to launch Absolute Return funds; Standard Life Investments to launch Pan European Property Recovery Fund; and Morningstar qualitative ratings and reports issued this week

Tom Whitelaw 27 November, 2009 | 12:35PM
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Anthony Bolton to return to fund management
Possibly the biggest fund related news this week has come out of Fidelity. As we reported yesterday, legendary investor Anthony Bolton is to return to active fund management. Bolton is relocating to Hong Kong and will manage a fund focused on China and China-related opportunities that should launch "around the end of the first quarter" of 2010. The full article is available here.

SWIP adds to Bond team
Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP) this week announced that it has hired James Tay

lor to its global bonds team from Gulf International Bank UK Ltd where he was head of fixed-income portfolios. Previous to this Taylor had spent nine years at Morley Fund Management. Within his new role at SWIP Taylor will be responsible for managing a selection of global government bond portfolios and for contributing towards SWIP's bond investment strategy. The firm had also recently hired Roger Webb and Andrew Tunks to work on the team.

Gartmore re-open Roger Guy’s European Absolute Return fund.
Gartmore have this week temporarily reopened Roger Guy’s European Absolute Return hedge fund. The group has announced that the fund will issue a further 70 million shares worth just under £78m at today’s NAV of 110.89 taking the total shares in issue to 340 million which swells the funds assets under management to £377m at today’s price. The fund is run by Guy and fellow fund manager Guillaume Rambourg. Since its inception at the end of January this year it has returned an impressive 11.1%, over eight percentage points more the funds Morningstar Europe Non-Euro Absolute Return category.

Thames River to launch fund of Absolute Return funds
Thames River is also looking to take advantage of the demand for absolute return strategies with the launch of a fund of absolute return funds. The new offering will be managed by Ken Kinsey-Quick who heads the group’s multi alternatives team. The fund is expected to hold a mixture of between 20 and 30 different absolute return strategies to provide diversification. Given the high fees and trading costs associated with many of these offerings, layering an additional set of fees on top and holding so many offerings (thus diluting the value added by any one of them) could hurt the fund's chances of delivering competitive performance.

Standard Life Investments to launch Pan European Property Recovery Fund
Standard Life Investments this week announced that it is to launch a Property Recovery Fund. The fund will be aimed at the high net worth advisory market with potential investors required to commit a minimum investment of £50,000. As the name indicates the fund hopes to profit from an expected recovery in property market returns across Europe. The fund will be run under a closed ended structure (which we believe makes eminent sense given the illiquid nature of the asset class) and be managed by Will Fulton. Standard Life Investments aims to raise up to £75m in equity for the fund and through borrowings will seek to leverage the property portfolio by 60% to target a gross asset value of £180m.

Morningstar qualitative ratings and reports issued this week
Morningstar issued new qualitative ratings and reports on a number of funds available to UK investors this week, including Royal London UK Special Situations and AXA Rosenberg European. Click here to see the full list.

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Tom Whitelaw  

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