Hong Kong manager launches event driven hedge fund at peak of global M&A activity

Michael Wegener

Michael Wegener, who has been running an event-driven strategy with proprietary family capital since early 2012, has launched the Case Equity Partners Opportunities Fund on 1 March, with $2.5m of seed money from the family, on a multi-manager platform. Case Equity Partners was founded in 2012 initially as a family office.

Wegener has 15 years of experience in global M&A advisory and event-driven investing - an investing strategy that seeks to exploit pricing inefficiencies that may occur before or after a corporate event, such as a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition or spinoff.

This may be a good time for such funds as 2015 was an extraordinary year for global M&A activity and 2016 looks very promising. MergerMarket recorded almost 17,000 transactions worth $4.3tln in 2015. This topped the previous record set in 2014 by over 30%. Concerns over global growth, along with divergence in economic and monetary policies should create further M&A opportunities in 2016. However, event-driven hedge funds have lagged a bit of late. The Barclay Event Driven Index is down 2.2% YTD (est.) to end-February, after returning -3.2% in 2015, 0.5% in 2014 and 10.8% in 2013. Wegener's strategy annualized 20% between May 2012 and July 2015.

"We are currently at the peak of global M&A activity," Wegener told Opalesque, "where we are seeing large-cap mergers with the stated intention to again break-up the combined companies in to several discreet entities, e.g. Pfizer-Allergan and Dow-Dupont, hence spanning both merger arbitrage and special situations."

Sourced from: ......................

To view our full article please login

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