Industry Updates

Morgan Stanley and Quantitative Investment Management partner to launch a new UCITS Fund

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Tweet
Print
Email
Track Keywords

Opalesque Industry Update: Morgan Stanley today announced the launch of a new fund under its FundLogic Alternatives plc umbrella. The launch is the second in a series of four CTA strategies to be made available in a UCITS format through Morgan Stanley’s partnership with Equinox Fund Management LLC, a U.S.-based multi-manager, specializing in constructing portfolios comprised of multiple Commodity Trading Advisor The first specialized CTA fund, the MS QTI UCITS Fund, was launched on the 24th of October 2012. Through their collaboration, Morgan Stanley and Equinox are leveraging their respective expertise to provide investors access to leading CTA strategies in a UCITS format.

“We are thrilled about this new collaboration with QIM, the world’s largest non trend following CTA manager, highly regarded for its short to medium-term expertise in managed futures trading program”, commented David Armstrong, Managing Director and Global Head of Fund and Fund- Linked business at Morgan Stanley.

He added: “QIM’s edge lies in its ability to capitalize on market inefficiencies in global equities and futures markets using proprietary statistical learning techniques to deliver outstanding risk- adjusted returns with negligible correlation to both traditional and alternative strategies as demonstrated in their appealing nine-year track record. We believe their numerous quantitative analysis and predictive technologies coupled with their systematic trading models - which use pattern recognition to predict price movements - and robust risk management offers a very unique positioning and set of competences to investors in search of diversification.”

Jaffray Woodriff, Chairman and CEO at QIM, commented: “We look forward to this new venture with Morgan Stanley, whose platform has led the pace with its ambitious plan in the CTA UCITS space. Our staff of thirty-two is dedicated to offering a great experience to investors, and we hope to expand that with this new relationship. Our flagship strategy, the Global Program, attempts to identify a large number of recurrent patterns that exist in the markets and then intelligently combine them for one robust predictive signal per day, per market. We apply sophisticated risk management procedures and continually seek improvements to the models in our trading strategy. We select only those models that prove to be the most statistically significant and conceptually diverse for actual trading, with the hope of providing reliable predictive signals that offer an investment edge and generate significant alpha over time. “

FundLogic is the brand name for Morgan Stanley’s fund solutions platform launched in 2006. It offers both UCITS and non-UCITS funds. The platform delivers fund solutions to clients by combining the financial expertise, innovation and resources of Morgan Stanley, and offers a range of products including passive index funds, structured funds and the more recently launched third party manager-UCITS Funds.

Morgan Stanley

Press Release

Article link