Following last week’s announcement, made jointly by BlueCrest and Merrill Lynch’s board of directors, to shutter the BlueTrend managed futures UCITS, the firm is now apparently lPARA_BREAK_SENTINEL_9f8e7d6c

Following last week’s announcement, made jointly by BlueCrest and Merrill Lynch’s board of directors, to shutter the BlueTrend managed futures UCITS, the firm is now apparently looking to convert its onshore Alignment Investors Fund into a UCITS-compliant wrapper reports UCITSHedge this week. Established as a sub-division of BlueCrest Capital Management in August 2008, the fund employs a fixed income absolute return mandate, with fixed income experts George Cooper (pictured), Andrew McCaffery and Richard Williams at the helm. Since the fund was launched in 2008 it has been actively tested against UCITS parameters, with no obvious constraints having been identified. The apparent core issue with the BlueTrend UCITS was that, whilst tracking positions in the offshore Cayman Islands fund, the tracking error widened to 3.5 per cent end-September. Restrictions within the UCITS framework were thought to be the problem. However, the Alignment Fund does not reference any offshore strategy or benchmark, eliminating the risk of tracking errors re-occurring. Nobody at Alignment Investors was available to comment at the time of writing and no timeline as to when the fund will be converted has yet been revealed.