Standard Life Investments has made its global absolute returns strategies solution available to institutional and wholesale investors in Australia.

The GARS Australian Trust has already secured around AUS75m from a prominent institutional investor.

Standard Life Investments’ GARS solution has already proved popular with UK and international investors. It has delivered gross annualised returns of 8.7 per cent over the last three years with a volatility level of 7.4 per cent. Over the same period, the MSCI Index returned 0.9 per cent with volatility of 19.0 per cent.
 
James Cooper, country head – Australia, Standard Life Investments (Asia), says: “We developed GARS in 2005 to significantly improve the risk/reward profile of Standard Life’s own defined benefit pension plan. Having performed admirably during the global crises over the last two years it is GARS' low correlation to conventional asset classes, low volatility (compared to traditional equity portfolios) and competitive fee structure that have cemented its popularity among investors. We now manage over GBP2.7bn across a range of GARS mandates for 134 institutional clients.

“Australian investors are increasingly recognising the benefits of a solution that provides global diversification across a range of traditional and non-traditional asset classes. The launch of the GARS Australian Trust should ensure easy and convenient access to one of Standard Life Investments’ principal investment strategies.”

The GARS Australian Trust invests its assets into an existing Offshore GARS Master/Feeder Fund (Cayman Islands) through a hedged Australian dollar share class. The underlying GARS portfolio is a dynamic multi-asset strategy. It uses traditional and non-traditional sources of return to target a cash plus five per cent unleveraged annualised return over rolling three-year periods.