Jeffrey Russo
Stone Toro Asset
Management LLC, an
asset management
firm based in Princeton,
New Jersey was formed
at the end of 2009 by
three ex-Merrill Lynch
colleagues, Mike Jarzyna,
Jeffrey Russo, and Richard
Jenkins. Jarzyna and Russo were also directors at BlackRock, and Russo, the
PM, managed more than $14bn in AUM as a Director
there.
Their fund, the ST Alpha Event Fund, which was
launched in January 2011, is an absolute return fund
using a global multi-strategy approach to eventdriven
arbitrage. It manages around $146.9m and
is up 0.92% YTD (to March), after returning +2.5%
in 2012 and +1.18% in 2011. It is also featured in
Opalesque's EManagers database.
Jeff Russo actually started trading his strategy while
at Bankers Trust in the mid-90s, where he served as
portfolio manager of global developed and emerging
market index funds with assets over $4bn (Bankers
Trust at the time was the third largest index manager
in the world, managing around $200bn worth of index related assets).
Russo defines "event" as things that are tangibly
happening in the market. "So we like to look at where
the world is, as opposed to the way we hope it to be
or wish it was," he tells Opalesque.
The ST Alpha Event Fund has four distinct strategies,
namely: index events, merger arbitrage, structural
changes (or special situations, corporate actions) and
relative value pairs.
"That's actually something that I think is a really
attractive part of the strategy is the breadth of the
index world and how the markets have changed over
time," Russo explains. "The markets have become
very passive with the emergence of ETFs. As active
management on the mutual fund side has decreased
in size, possibly due to active managers' long-term
inab......................
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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.
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