Alpha Ucits, a London-based independent UCITS distribution platform established by ex-Brevan Howard’s Stephane Diederich in October 2009, has won its first UCITS structuring manPARA_BREAK_SENTINEL_9f8e7d6c

Alpha Ucits, a London-based independent UCITS distribution platform established by ex-Brevan Howard’s Stephane Diederich in October 2009, has won its first UCITS structuring mandate having decided at the start of this year to look for offshore hedge fund strategies unavailable onshore. “We did a worldwide search in January and decided that GSB Podium Advisors were the best choice,” Diederich told Hedgeweek. The strategy they chose was equity statistical arbitrage, with Diederich explaining that “it was an obvious choice, it’s an underrepresented strategy that adds a lot of value to a hedge fund portfolio”. New York-based GSB Podium Advisors may not be well known to everyone having only launched this March. But its founder, Shengbei Guo, is certainly well known for his formerly astute management of Deutsche Bank’s Noetic Equity Long/Short Fund. Guo plans to launch a statistical arbitrage hedge fund at the start of 2011, followed by the UCITS-compliant version in March/April. “We’ve been working on the fund’s structure for the last two months and are about to file the fund,” said Diederich, adding that GSB agreed to them distributing the fund exclusively to European clients because “they share our views on the growing hedge fund UCITS space in Europe”. The newcits fund will be market neutral and will employ quantitative strategies based on price mean-reversion and price momentum to generate returns.