Quaesta Capital AG has launched a new currency only fund of fund tailor made to meet the needs of Swiss pension funds.
Quaesta Capital AG has launched a new currency only fund of fund tailor made to meet the needs of Swiss pension funds.

The Quaesta Capital Foreign Exchange Multi Manager Program (FX-MMP) Pension Fund is a multi-manager Alpha program which selects and invests into single currency hedge funds and CTA's on a global basis. It has attracted a significant initial investment by a Swiss pension fund.

This fund investment acts as a short term Cash substitute for Swiss pension funds. The highly liquid asset offers weekly redemption, an important criterion in order to be part of 'Cash/Liquid assets' within the balance sheet.

The fund's manager, Quaesta Capital AG, combines quantitative excellence with the professional experience and know-how of Quaesta Capital's team members. Martin Wiedmann, CEO & Partner of Quaesta Capital AG says: 'This niche product is well suited for Swiss pension funds, viewing Currencies as a separate asset class in their investment portfolio.'

Through diversification on various levels a significant risk reduction takes place. Out of the ~200 global FX hedge fund managers in Quaesta Capital's Fund Manager database, Quaesta Capital's portfolio allocation model dipCast selects and allocates the relevant programs for the FX-MMP Pension fund. Together with a thorough due diligence process a final allocation of typically ~ 10 selected single managers takes place.

The proactive managed fund will invest in single hedge fund strategies and styles, such as 'Fundamental', 'Technical', 'Discretionary' and 'Systematic', as opportunities arise, and its goal is to generate positive performance while demonstrating low correlation to stock, bond and real estate investments as well as to common alternative strategies, while targetting a medium performance of 8% with a volatility of 4 to 5% per year.

A thorough qualitative as well as quantitative analysis takes place for each single hedge fund (SHF). During the qualitative analysis, emphasis is placed on the manager selection as well as corporate governance & risk management of the SHF. The quantitative analysis concentrates on the strategies and styles of the SHFs, investigating past performance, skewness, kurtosis as well as correlations to other SHF's with similar strategies and styles. In addition the stability of performance in extreme market conditions is analysed. For the live portfolio construction, Quaesta Capital utilizes „dipCast, developed in cooperation with the University of Dortmund artificial intelligence department, which has been specifically designed for hedge fund management.

The Quaesta Capital FX-MMP Pension Fund was launched on 3 July 2006.