A couple of hedge fund managers at the recent Opalesque London Roundtable discussed the seeding or partnership opportunities with emerging fund managers, which they are starting to take advantage off. UCITS and offshore seeding vehicles

Pierre Crama

The seeding opportunity is here, as there is "a considerable flow of talent with whom we are in dialogue to assess their business propositions," says Pierre Crama, Deputy Head of Operational Due Diligence at Tages Capital. "A unique differentiating factor at Tages is the ability to offer a seed ticket to launch a new product or a replication of an existing fund in a different structure."

London and Milan-based Tages Capital is primarily focused on tailor-made alternative multi-manager hedge fund and UCITS solutions. It merged its fund of hedge fund business with La Française, a French fund of funds business, last year. Recently, the firm launched a frontier market fund of hedge funds, and a vehicle to seed or provide acceleration capital to some emerging managers. It has already seeded three managers in the last eight months.

The firm is active in seeding UCITS across a number of platforms, he continues. It acted as day-1 investor for AnavonCapital's new Global Equity Long/Short UCITS fund last October, for example.

Tages is also in the process of raising further capital for its offshore seeding vehicle. It recently seeded a discretionary macro manager based in New York.

Some of the investment opportunities the firm wants to take advantage of is European equity, M&A, dislocation in the energy space, China, idiosyncratic catalysts such as Argentina's upcoming election; "We are considering picking one specific manager to play this theme until the opportunity set fully manifests itself."

"Most platforms struggle to raise the fir......................

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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.