Alternative Market Briefing

Execs leave SocGen to launch multi-commodity discretionary hedge fund

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

Two managing directors have just left Société Générale (SG), the French investment bank, to launch a new commodity hedge fund house in Paris called Belaco Capital. The official launch date of their first fund is expected in Q4 this year.

One of them is Dr. Frédéric Lasserre; he built and headed the SG commodity research and strategy team, which constantly ranked among the top threes by the industry. He worked closely with Christophe Cordonnier for 15 years, now his partner in the venture. Cordonnier set up and headed the SG sales and structuring commodity investor business. A third ex-SocGen exec joins them, namely Francois Beuzelin, who spent 12 years at SG, first heading metals trading, then managing a commodity fund in the last two years.

"The three of us have been working in the commodities markets for the past 15 years, so we’ve seen a lot going on" Cordonnier told Opalesque in an interview. While Beuzelin’s focus is in metals and sectors, Lasserre’s area is fundamentals in each sector and Cordonnier has designed many investment banking-type solutions for different investors.

The three men are going to build a product that they believe is not currently available in the market.

The key driver of the strategy is and will remain the fundamentals of the market, Cordonnier explains. "That’s all we’ve been looking at for the past years and that is what we believe will be driving the commodity prices. So that will ......................

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