Crédit Agricole?s Alternative Investment Products Group plans to launch a directional fund of hedge funds this year using a global macro and systematic trading strategy. The alternatives manager would also consider launching an equity futures single-strategy fund of funds, which would round out its single-strategy fund offering.
CA-AIPG was spun out of Crédit Agricole in 1992. Its flagship fund of hedge funds product is a global diversified fund of funds. Last year this fund returned 9% to investors, net of fees, with a correlation of less than 0.2 and a target volatility of about 4%. Jean-Claude Kaltenbach, chairman of CA-AIPG, says: ?We wanted to offer investors a broadly diversified product, at a time when alternative investments were not as well known as today, bringing the advantage of a reduction of risk through broad diversification across strategies and a large number of managers.?
Typical strategies represented in the portfolio are fixed-income arbitrage, convertible arbitrage, merger arbitrage, high-yield/distressed, macro-global, directional trading and long/short equity.
In 1999, the firm launched its first single-strategy fund of funds. This was a global arbitrage fund. Frederic Neefs, head of investments London, says: ?It excludes any directional strategies to decrease the correlation with any index.?