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Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers: Most multi-strategy funds promise diversification. Fewer can explain why their return streams should stay independent when markets turn. In an Opalesque SkillsLab investor workshop on October 29, London-based Fasanara Capital set out its answer: build portfolios around return engines whose economics are structurally different, and only scale those engines on top of infrastructure built first. A user-friendly video replay of the session is available for eligible investors here.
Fasanara manages around USD7.5bn, approaching USD8bn, with a team of more than 150 across London, New York, Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam and Ferrara. The session centred on F-ONE ("ONE Fasanara Multi-Strategy"), the firm's flagship multi-strategy vehicle. F-ONE gives investors exposure across close to 200 pods in three engines: short-duration fintech credit, market neutral digital asset trading, and a quantitative multi-manager platform.
The speakers were Francesco Filia, Founder, CEO and CIO; Nikita Fadeev, Managing Partner and Head of Fasanara Digital; Vinicius Karam, Head of Fasanara OpenQuant; and Paolo Viale, Managing Director and Head of Business Development.
"Enough beta plays in the market"
Filia framed the firm's philosophy plainly. In his view, the market has no shortage of beta. What allocators lack are alpha generators whose income can be relied on in every market regime. Since its founding in 2011, Fasanara has focused on niche, often overlooked corners of the market that others failed to institutionalise, then used in-house technology to scale them. Technology has always been the firm's largest team, covering software development, data science and, more recently, AI.
F-ONE has a three-year full track record. Filia reported double-digit annualised net performance and manages close to USD1bn with a stated capacity of USD3bn for its return objective of 10% to 15% net in dollars at 2% to 4% annualised volatility.
Engine one: short-duration credit as a risk management tool
Fasanara's longest track record is in alternative credit. Filia said these strategies have never had a negative month in twelve years. The firm finances loans and receivables originated by fintech platforms, with typical durations of around 90 days and sometimes as short as 30.
The selection funnel shows how much work sits behind the strategy. Fasanara mapped more than 1,300 potential originators worldwide. It ran full due diligence, each review taking six to nine months, more than 465 times. It has onboarded 139 originators in 60 countries. Fasanara acts as what Filia called a kind of "non-central bank" to these non-bank lenders: it provides capital under strict conditions and re-underwrites individual positions through a central, real-time risk book.
The investor takeaway was Filia's argument for short duration, which he called a "superpower" in risk management. Long-duration credit has shown equity-like volatility as rates rose, he noted, even in Treasuries. A typical direct lending book holds 50 to 100 loans with five- to eight-year maturities. A 90-day book, by contrast, can be repurposed several times a year, and capital can move away from deteriorating sectors, countries or borrowers as loans repay. "Instead of looking at the default risk, you look at the jump to default risk," Filia said.
He stressed that short duration alone is not enough. It must be combined with high granularity (millions of positions, not hundreds) and low or no leverage, which "will be taken away at the wrong time" at turning points. Small ticket sizes also give pricing power, so yields are high relative to the risk taken. "Small is beautiful," Filia said.
Recent origination channels include a platform for loans backed by collectible and racing Ferraris, built with partners from the Ferrari family, which already has a pipeline of USD200m to USD300m. Fasanara also partners with Tether, which brings fintech platforms to Fasanara for financing, partly in USDT, and has already introduced around 40 platforms worldwide. A third channel, announced in June, is a partnership with the IFC to finance working capital platforms in emerging markets, including across Africa.
Engine two: market neutral liquidity provision in digital assets
Fadeev described Fasanara Digital as a fully systematic liquidity provider. Founded in 2018, when the asset class was "almost a curse word" for institutions, it now has around 30 people, mostly in research and technology. The team trades on more than 20 venues, including Nasdaq, NYSE and LMAX alongside crypto-native exchanges.
The core is basis and cross-venue arbitrage. When the same instrument, such as a Bitcoin future, trades at a discount of a basis point or less on one exchange versus another, the strategy bids on one venue, offers on the other and hedges as soon as one leg fills. This happens hundreds of thousands, sometimes a million, times a day. Fasanara Digital trades around USD1bn notional per day, roughly 1% of global digital asset volume. Fadeev put the maximum drawdown ever at around 1%, with typically one or two negative days a month.
He highlighted a significant development: this year the strategy expanded into traditional markets, which now account for 30% to 40% of its risk. Fadeev sees the convergence of traditional and crypto markets toward 24/7 trading, including tokenised equities, commodities and ETFs on crypto infrastructure, as a "one-way trend" and a major tailwind. He noted that such strategies have historically stayed in proprietary trading firms because returns are high and capital needs small. That makes outside investor access to them unusual.
Engine three: a multi-SMA quant platform for emerging managers
Karam presented Fasanara OpenQuant, which allocates to external systematic managers through managed accounts rather than fund investments. For allocators weighing fund-of-funds structures, he set out three benefits of this design:
Control: the assets stay in Fasanara's own brokerage sub-accounts, so a manager can be "plugged and unplugged" at any time.
Transparency: every position is visible in real time, allowing risk limits down to the instrument level, plus P&L decomposition, factor attribution and position-level manager comparisons.
Capital efficiency: managers do not need fully funded allocations at all times, and margin can be netted across strategies, allowing controlled leverage.
OpenQuant targets emerging managers who are nonetheless experienced traders running niche, capacity-constrained systematic strategies. It requires at least 18 months of live, auditable track record and does not accept backtests. Onboarding typically takes around six months, often starting with a small allocation.
The fund launched in 2024 and has passed USD220m. It runs 53 strategies across 33 pods, spread across volatility (16% of risk, with a preference for long convexity over short volatility), arbitrage (16%, mostly in Asia), equity market neutral (18%), quant macro, and tactical relative value strategies (12%). Returns rose from close to 7% in the first year to 12% in the second and 15.7% annualised year to date, at average volatility of 2.3%. Karam reported a year-to-date Sharpe of 5.2, positive returns in 85% of months and 92% of quarters, and a maximum drawdown of 2%. The firm recently hired senior allocators to expand its equity market neutral and quant macro books.
Diversification is not the same as independence
Viale brought the three engines together with a point many allocators will recognise. Credit earns income from financed assets, digital strategies monetise market structure inefficiencies, and quant strategies harvest systematic signals. Different economic sources of return are a strong basis for diversification, he argued, but "it does not establish independence by itself." Allocators still need to examine the full value chain of each trade, including execution costs, funding and borrowing terms, hedging, collateral, venue constraints and operational risk. Historical correlations are useful evidence but have limits when conditions change.
He made the same point about granularity: "a large number of positions does not necessarily mean a large number of independent risks." Value comes from spotting where apparently separate exposures share the same vulnerabilities. Viale also separated three liquidity concepts that are often confused: holding period, underlying asset liquidity and fund redemption terms. His core question for any return stream was who pays for it, why the opportunity exists and what could make it disappear.
Viale said roughly one third of F-ONE's capacity comes from each platform. He expects capacity to grow as existing strategies are redeployed into new markets and instruments, and as new credit and quant pods come on stream. He added that capacity discipline is part of the edge: some opportunities are attractive precisely because they cannot absorb unlimited capital.
How do you fight alpha erosion?
In the Q&A, the panel addressed every allocator's concern about whether the edge lasts.
Fadeev said the crypto arbitrage of 2018 could be done "with bare hands" and fast internet. Those trades have since been commoditised, and competition is now concentrated among a few well-equipped players. High barriers to entry make the business more defensible for those who have built the infrastructure.
Filia emphasised infrastructure first. On the credit side, he said the platform took ten years to build. Its technology was later spun off as Cardo AI, in which Blackstone has taken a stake, and now has around USD140bn of assets under technology. Adding new countries and originators is getting easier because the standardised tech and regulatory groundwork already exist. He noted that in a month when many multi-strategy funds showed correlated behaviour, Fasanara's digital and quant books held up well and credit "keeps powering ahead."
Karam described a three-step defence. First, back managers who understand their strategy's true capacity and will not overscale it. Second, use position-level data to detect when a strategy is drifting toward a factor or benchmark, which is a red flag. Third, always be ready to replace managers. That is why OpenQuant keeps a pipeline of several hundred pods against around 30 invested: some decay is expected.
The takeaway for allocators
Fasanara's case for F-ONE rests less on any single strategy than on how the three engines interact and on the shared technology, risk and operational infrastructure that manages them together. As Viale suggested at the start of the session (eligible investors can watch a video replay of the session here), the question for allocators is not whether these strategies perform in isolation. It is what they add to the risks already in the portfolio.
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