New Managers July 2012

Fundana Series: Are emerging managers becoming more and more experienced?

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Are emerging managers becoming more and more experienced?

The Fundana series discusses investments in Emerging Managers, derived from the real world experience of the Fundana team. Fundana is the investment advisor to several Funds of Hedge Funds and directs around half of its new investments to Emerging Managers. The investment process typically involves allocating a small amount Day 1 or Early Stage (within the first year after the fund's launch) to new managers who have strong pedigrees. The objective of this series of articles is to share thoughts around our key observations. It does not aim to be Ã¢â‚¬Å“statistically significantÃ¢â‚¬ but to create a dialogue around those observations.

The Emerging Managers space is currently in vogue. Following the 2008 credit crisis, allocators focused first on the opportunity to invest with previously hard-closed Blue Chip hedge fund managers. Now that most of those funds are hard-closed again, investors are taking another look at Emerging Managers.

This article looks at the experience of the fund managers when they launch their hedge funds, encompassing their previous experiences in the financial industry and in hedge funds specifically. The goal is to identify any differences between the pre-crisis and the post-crisis environments on the ability of emerging managers to join the ranks of their more celebrated peers and the career path they had followed to reach this elite group.

We will focus on small and mid-sized fund launches (typical Day 1 assets under management (Ã¢â‚¬Å“AUMÃ¢â‚¬) of between $20m and $500m) as Fundana does not invest in the very large new launches (>$1bn at launch). The dataset has been compiled from all new investments made in our Funds of Hedge Funds since January 2006, encompassing 69 Day 1 / Early Sta......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.