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By Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London.

London-based Insparo Asset Management launched its inaugural offshore hedge fund, a multi-strategy fund targeting the frontier markets in Africa and the Middle East, in May 2008 with $125m.

The Insparo Africa Master Fund, sprung from a managed account, is run by the firm's principals, CEO Mohammed Hanif and head of research Francis Beddington, and is aimed at institutional investors. The fund's performance for July was +2.68%; the return was split between 84.5% from fixed income, +14.99% equities and +0.49% from foreign exchange. It is up 13.42% YTD and down 1.29% since inception, with $138.1m in AuM.

The opportunities that Insparo sees have not changed much since the firm was launched in 2007; they are to be found in growth and development of financial markets. "There is the real economic growth story and the expression of that is in the financial markets and we continue to see that," Mohamed Hanif told Opalesque.

According to the fund managers, two key themes stand out, both supporting their thesis of relative economic outperformance in the region and deepening of financial markets.

Commodity prices The first theme is higher commodity prices, especially oil prices, which have boosted liquidity in the GCC (Saudi, Qata......................

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