After the recent decision to remove the BlueTrend fund, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s MLIS platform, widely regarded as the industry’s leading Ucits platform, has resPARA_BREAK_SENTINEL_9f8e7d6c

After the recent decision to remove the BlueTrend fund, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s MLIS platform, widely regarded as the industry’s leading Ucits platform, has responded quickly. In the past month, three major funds have been onboarded, each with USD10million in AUM in seed capital – they include the Graham Capital Systematic Macro Ucits, York Asian Event-Driven Ucits and Zweig-DiMenna’s US Long-Short Equity Ucits. “We’re looking to create a diversified range of strategies for our clients to give them top quality choice,” Head of MLIS Miriam Muller told Hedgeweek. “Before year-end we will also launch a relative value strategy but I don’t expect this to be available to external investors until early January.” Indeed the MLIS pipeline is looking healthy for next year, with eight mandates (including the RV strategy) at various stages of development. January alone, according to Muller, will see a multi strategy fund launch along with a clean technology water sector fund (global with a US-bias). Other managers include: global emerging macro, FX, merger arbitrage, volatility arbitrage and an alpha capture fund.
 
All of which suggests MLIS shows no signs of sitting back in the ever-competitive newcits space. Muller admits that the closure of the BlueTrend fund was unfortunate.  She states that perhaps 60 per cent of hedge fund strategies accurately fit the UCITS-III structure without the need for tailoring although many investors will accept differences between the UCITS fund and offshore version of the strategy in order to gain access to the expertise of the manager in a regulated format.  “With the York Event Driven fund (which has raised over USD560million) we don’t track the master fund and with the recently launched Graham Capital CTA fund there will be differences but investors are well aware of these and are demonstrating a lot of interest.” The platform has certainly escalated its onboarding this year, but in terms of AUM, Muller is not completely satisfied: “We would have liked to have been closer to USD2billion in AUM but we’re confident we’re well positioned to attract assets in 2011. Our target AUM is USD5billion by end-2011.”